X is for Xanthan Gum and XXX

I am so excited! I am featured today on the Mysteristas site. If you want to know some insider information about me, this is the place! Please drop in and leave a note! http://mysteristas.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/interview-sharon-arthur-moore/

Last three letters of the alphabet, last three days of this blog challenge. I want to invite you to return after the challenge is over. I cover a wide-range of topics here, from recipes to information on my mysteries to cooking tips and techniques. I love having readers drop in and comment. Please, be a regular.

I’ll bet you wondered what I could possibly write about today. You may even have gone hunting for food terms. Perhaps you thought I would do xylitol (a sweetener, and other things) or xuxu (chayote) or xi gua (Chinese watermelon) or xiphios (Greek for swordfish) or xoconostle (green prickly pear) or xocolatl (Aztec word for chocolate) or xouba (small fish near Spain) or xom tum (a spicy Thai dish) or . . . need I go on? (And I am not clever to get a bunch more x-terms in this post?)

It was tough, yet again, choosing terms that I thought you might not know (but should) or terms that you were confused about. On to it!

X is for Xanthan Gum (ZAN-thun)

This is a term you might find on processed foods you buy. You could make your own xanthan gum, a natural carbohydrate, were you so inclined to ferment corn sugar and extract the tiny microorganism xanthan gum comes from as a by-product. Nah! Let the scientists do it.

Xanthan gum has a huge number of uses in processed foods. You will see it used as an emulsifier, a stablizer of food elements, a gelling agent, a foaming agent, a thickener, a whipping agent, and a suspending agent. Whew! That’s a lot of usefulness from one product. However, most often xanthan gum is used as an emulsifier, stablizer or thickener in foods you buy like salad dressings, gravies, ice cream, sauces, or dairy products like sour cream and yogurt. When people are cooking gluten-free baked goods, they likely use xanthan gum as a gluten substitute to give volume so the bread rises. Check your labels. Betcha you’re eating xanthan gum.

X is for XXX

This was tough. How many ‘X’s” should I put up because this is what you will find on packages of confectioner’s sugar. The number of X’s refers to the number of times sugar is ground to make it finer and finer particles. X is the designator of powdered sugar aka confectioner’s sugar. You probably use XXX or XXXX, but ultra-fine powdered sugar is 10x.

You could indeed grind your granulated sugar over and over and over to make your own confectioner’s sugar, but odds are you don’t have the tools in your kitchen to get as fine a grind as the commercial sugars.

If you do decide to make your own, use your coffee grinder or even a mortar and pestle. You should also add an anti-caking agent such as cornstarch, flour, or calcium phosphate as commercial brands do. Because of these additives, powdered sugar is not a good beverage sweetener!

Some other sugars you may have seen are caster sugar aka baker’s sugar or superfine sugar. Caster sugar has grains about half the size of granulated sugar. Or you may have come across snow powder (aka snow sugar) which has other additives like dextrose, starch, and anti-binding agents.

Just an FYI: the British call powdered or confectioner’s sugar, icing sugar and it is made without flour or cornstarch.

L is for Lardons and Lecithin

Love my cooking shows! And how they have proliferated in the last couple of years. I remember the days when Julia Child’s “The French Chef” and Graham Kerr’s “The Galloping Gourmet” were the only cooking shows on TV. Then we went a realllllly long time before the advent of the Food Network and its shows.

In fact, part of my love of cooking and thus my career as a culinary mystery writer (Have you read Mission Impastable yet?) can be traced, in part, to the fascination with those programs

As an avid watcher of programs, I am alert to the new-to-me foods highlighted on shows like “Chopped.” It was on “Chopped”, in fact, that I first heard the word lardon used. A great thing about "Chopped" is that the celebrity chef judges will talk about the ingredients in each basket, educating those of us who don’t know what in the heck is in the mystery basket.

Lardon is a chunk of pork fat (from the pig belly) that is used to flavor and bring moisture into cuts of meat being braised on roasted. If you think you see a connection to lard, that fat Grandma used in her pie crusts and to fry chicken, you are correct. Lard is the rendered fat from said pork belly. <Here’s a bonus: render means to extract the fat via heating.>

Traditionally, one would sew lardons, sort of, into the meats to keep them in place while cooking. Alternatively, sometimes, cooks crisp up lardons to add to salads, dressings, or to layer flavors in dishes like quiche, omelets, or beef stews.

Sometimes you’ll see a recipe calling for bacon lardons. That does not mean a strip of bacon. It means the fat only from that strip of bacon. And skinny bacon strips aren’t good for extracting usable pieces of fat. Get the thickest bacon you can find and trim away the meat, keeping the lardon for your dish.

Today’s second term is one you’ve seen a million times if you read food labels. Hold it. Not IF you read food labels; WHEN you read food labels.

Lecithin is a fatty substance that can come from plant or animal sources. Its main purpose is to emulsify (allow things to blend that might not otherwise) ingredients. A tablespoon of soybean lecithin (a vegetable oil) has 100 grams of fat and 763 calories. Lecithin is often a component in non-stick cooking sprays since it also helps prevent food from sticking.

Using lecithin-based products (like cooking sprays) means less fat is used than what would normally be the case. As both an emulsifier and a lubricant, many cooking folks like that fewer calories are consumed when coating cook surfaces.

Lecithin is considered to be a harmless compound. Cooks wanting to use whole wheat flour only for baking bread find lecithin gives them the soft, airiness of white flour bread. It provides the moisture that seems to make the difference between dense and light.

Food for thought (so to speak): Check your paint cans. Lecithin is used as a paint emulsifier. Yummy!