Alternative Starches: How to thicken sauces without flour

if you want to make a gravy type sauce without the use of wheat flour as a thickener you have so many good options whether you're cooking for somebody with celiac disease or you just want to try some different textures I'm going to show you a few experiments with some widely available things like corn starch and air our roots also we'll examine some more exotic options like xanthan gum and agar agar please agar agar is my father call me agar first I think it'll help to just remind ourselves how starches thicken sauces in the first place let's get our Alton Brown on the big white cotton balls there represent the water-based liquid that we're going to try to thicken could be meat drippings could be dissolved fond milk wine whatever all the water molecules are spread out in a thin layer because there's not much holding them together the sauce is loose thin then we throw some starch into our sauce these are tightly packed carbohydrate granules little balls of sugar polymers that naturally occur in lots of plants not just wheat then we apply some heat to the sauce the starch granules unravel and explode this is called gelatinization then you stir the mixture and the exploded starches bond with the water and everything gets tangled together in a big web that traps the water molecules in three dimensions they're heaped up on top of each other now and our sauce is thick thickeners can also keep fats from separating out of your sauce if you add oil to your water-based sauce it will naturally just float to the top in a grease layer because fat molecules are light and hydrophobic but adds some starch and some heat the granules explode and the water and fat molecules alike are trapped in the same web together it's not the most stable sauce ever but starch does a pretty good job of keeping sauces from separating now not all of these starches are the same some are little straight chains of glucose that's amylose and some are big branched chains of glucose called amylopectin the primary practical difference between the various kinds of cooking starches is the relative proportion of amylose and amylopectin within them they just have different properties in the pan depending on that relative proportion now when you're thicken a sauce with flour the most common way you do it is by making rue you melt some butter into a pan you stir in enough flour to make a paste you cook it for a minute maybe you let it brown depending on the flavor and color that you're after then you gradually whisk in enough liquid to get the sauce consistency that you want being sure to bring it to a boil which is the temperature that wheat starch needs in order to gelatin eyes however the most common way that people thicken with alternative starches is with a slurry and we'll start with cornstarch Brits would call this corn flour and that's technically more accurate flour is a grain root being etc that has been ground up into a dry powder it might be the whole grain as in the case of whole wheat flour or it might just be the white part of the grain the endosperm in the case of this stuff which is white wheat flour regardless flour has stuff in it other than just starch most notably protein products that are sold as starch and not flour generally have only starch in there the starch has been isolated from the other stuff via some kind of chemical or physical process corn starch despite its u.s. name is not refined it's just white corn flour but because corn endosperm naturally has so much more starch in it than anything else it basically functions the way an isolated starch would so I'm guessing that's why it's labeled as corn starch in the states even though that's technically wrong anyway when people thicken with starches that aren't flour they usually do it by means of a slurry gonna take a little bit of corn starch just put it into any kind of small container I like to do it in a mason jar and then you got to mix in some liquid and that liquid can't be hot basically equal parts starch and liquid and then you could either mix that around really vigorously or what you can do with a mason jar or any other Linnet container is shake it up totally smooth then you just go over to the hot liquid that you're using for your sauce I'm just using carton to beef broth for all of these experiments and to stir in enough slurry to get the thickness that you want different starches gelatin eyes at different temperatures corn starch does it it's slightly less than a boil the reason you do the slurry is to get the starch granules separated from each other if you through dry starch or flour directly into the hot liquid it would clump up your sauce would be lumpy that's one reason that we mix wheat flour into a root too all of the granules dispersed in the fat away from each other so that they won't clump up when the liquid hits the pan but you can also use a wheat flour slurry to thicken a sauce that's what this is the problem is that if you taste it that sauce has an unpleasant raw flour taste which is a real thing you'd have to simmer this for a while to cook out that flavor whereas if you cook flour in a roux that raw taste goes away really really fast cooking flour in arewe does two other things for you though if you let it brown a bit it gives your sauce a nice brown color without using that bizarre gravy browning stuff that the Brits like to use it's basically caramel water anyway also if you let your Roux get really Brown it gives the sauce a toasty caramelized flavor this phenomenon is used to the max in Cajun food a culinary tradition that is based on all of the different flavors and textures you can get by browning roux to varying extents so since roux tastes good I've always wondered why people make a slurry with cornstarch instead of making a roux with it let's try oh hi I guess he caught me editing myself I've just been listening with my new headphones which occurred to C of the sponsor of this video ray con ray cons a cool company founded by Ray J he was sick of premium audio being so overpriced so he got with some audio engineers and he came up with these perfect bluetooth pairing I don't have wires dangling in my way there's a microphone in them for phone calls and you know they sound just as good as other premium audio brands but start at about half the price for video production purposes what's really nice is the flawless noise-isolating fit I can be reasonably assured that what I'm hearing in my headphones is what came through my microphones and not the sound that's just around me in the room click my link in the description below to get access to ray cons Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals I can't even tell you how good the deals are gonna be you're gonna check it out on the site anyway we were about to hear see and smell what happens when you try to make a roux out of cornstarch hmm it's putting off some weird smells whisk in the broth heated up to gelatin eyes and give it a taste that has a kind of funny flavor to it but frankly I think that cornstarch always has a kind of funny flavor to it some people describe it as chalky or I kind of think of it as rubbery you're kind of chemically anyway it's not a really big deal and it goes away after you cook it for a while one thing I like about the cornstarch Roux versus the cornstarch slurry is that the reversion is more opaque normally cornstarch thicken sauces are kind of clear I would guess because cornstarch has so little protein in it and if you're trying to make gravy clear gravy is kind of weird let's try something else this is potato starch very common in u.s. grocery stores if it's not next to the corn starch it might be in a kosher food section Jews aren't supposed to eat grains at Passover so potato starch slurry goes in that thickens at a way lower temperature and it is clear as glass it also doesn't have any funny flavor totally tasteless people say that you shouldn't bring potato starch to a full boil because that'll cause it to break down quickly if you cook any starts long and hot enough those glucose chains will start to break apart and then water molecules fall out of the web the sauce thins out again but I boiled this for a very long time adding water to compensate for evaporation and I didn't really observe any breakdown I did the same thing with my corn starch too I boiled it hard for like 20 minutes nothing seemed to thin out but even if it did you could just mix in a little bit more slurry to compensate I think a lot of the differences between different food starches that you read about are really only an issue when you're making food at a commercial or industrial scale when very tiny differences can multiply into huge differences when you're cooking at home things are just way less sensitive and you can easily compensate for stuff okay now things get interesting when we try making a roux out of the potato starch brown potatoes taste really good so I'm betting this is gonna taste really good and indeed the resulting sauce is delicious it's still a little unnerving Lee clear but man that tastes really good we get very similar results from rice flour again a pretty widely available item it's not an isolated starch it's just ground-up white rice slurry goes in that has to come to a good boil before it thickens and it's slightly more opaque probably because it's a flower there's stuff in there other than just starch totally neutral flavor but when we make the roux with rice flour we let it brown little bit whisk in the broth and that is again delicious no surprise there right rice that has been browned always tastes good and I like that this version is not as translucent as the potato starch gravy that's good gravy let's run through some other starches real quick here's tapioca a starch extracted from the tuber known as cassava or yucca in the slurry goes a very nice clear sauce but I think it has kind of an unpleasant slimy texture on the tongue it's also reputed to do weird things when you stir it a lot while cooking it kind of clumps up not a fan tapioca is often used in desserts like fruit pie fillings is reputed to freeze and thaw really well it's also reputed to stand up to acid really well acid can break down starches and thin them out now is that danger irrelevant to sauce making well if we put some vinegar and a pinch of sugar into this gravy you have the base of like half of the gloopy sauces that you know and love from Chinese american-style restaurants pretty tasty stuff I tried making the same sauce with cornstarch which is reputed to be easily broken down by acid and I noticed too no such problems may be a savory sauce just isn't acidic enough to break anything down and if the sauce did thin out you could just put in more slurry corn starts very popular in Chinese American restaurants here is arrowroot starch I think that the dried product has this weird minty smell but the sauce thickened with the slurry is nice and clear and has a neutral flavor people say that arrowroot sauces don't reheat well they break down easily well let's try pouring this off refrigerating it for a while and then reheating it in the microwave I noticed no thinning at all in fact it's nice that it reheats smooth when you reheat sauce is made with wheat flour or corn starch I often find that I can't get them smooth again no matter how hot I get them this is the coin starch thickened sauce really gloppy and jelly-like even though it's really hot not nice arrowroot has another bad reputation which is that it does weird things in dairy I'm just thickening some milk with arrowroot slurry and indeed it has a super weird slimy texture no good all right so those are the big root tuber and grain starches let's experiment with some more exotic stuff this is xantham gum I bought this down at my normal grocery store the other day it is a very popular additive in industrial prepared foods it's not technically a starch it's another kind of polysaccharide made by fermenting sugars with a particular kind of bacteria first I tried making a slurry with it and that did not work at all it clumped up the second it hit the water in the jar the package suggest some mixing it in with an oil slurry instead and indeed xantham gum disperses very easily and smoothly into fat you got to give it a few minutes to gel up but then a tiny amount of it has incredible thickening power and that sauce has a really pleasant smooth mouthfeel xanthan gum is often used an ice cream for that nice smooth mouthfeel it gives I figured because it disperses so well in fat maybe it would work well in a roux yes I made xanthan gum roux and the resulting gravy had a totally different texture chalky powdery gross couldn't tell you why that happened but don't do it one thing I can tell you about xanthan gum is that you don't have to get it hot it gels and virtually any temperature I'll show you that's room-temperature broth scatter and some xanthan gum it clumps up really bad in water but if you stir it around and then let it sit for a few minutes its thickens up without any cooking at all now I've seen so-called molecular gastronomy chefs do this and then either try to blend out those lumps with an immersion blender or strain them out but remember that the xanthan gum does dissolve very smoothly in fat there you can see why this stuff is a very popular thickener and prepackaged salad dressings will mix that oil into the broth let it sit for a few minutes and in gels right up it looks kind of gritty like apple sauce but it tastes smooth now watch this I'm gonna get it really hot in the microwave and the texture is exactly the same that is exciting when you thicken a sauce with a starch the viscosity varies tremendously depending on the sauces temperature that's why when you make say a pot pie you got to let it cool a long time before you scoop it out otherwise the sauce will just fall right off the other ingredients and run out all over the plate if you thickened your sauce with xanthan gum it would be the same thickness regardless of whether it was piping hot or lukewarm that's awesome so this is something that I'm gonna need to experiment with more down the road one more experiment though now agar agar call me agar this is a mixture of a polysaccharide and a pectin derived from it's used in packaged foods a lot and it's also a vegan replacement for gelatin which comes from animals agar powder dissolves really easily into water you do not have to make a slurry with it and when you bring it to a boil the sauce has this texture of a reduced meat stock more kind of anxious than thick but let's try the Heston Blumenthal trick Heston boiled in some agar then he puts the stuff into a jug and chills it now it's like a very stiff jello but unlike jello it is heat resistant that will not melt when you get it hot again so to turn it into a sauce Heston busts it up with a stick blender and that looks like regurgitated dog food and the texture is repulsive a foam made up of tiny little rubber beans fitting it out with more broth does not help sorry Heston I think I did it wrong come to think of it when I saw him do this on one of his shows he was doing it with a dairy based sauce and I've read that agar reacts differently with dairy I might have also just used way too much more experimentation is needed there but I hope you'll find my more successful experiments here to be useful to you I think the big takeaway here is that there are lots of food starches and they all work but since Thanksgiving is coming up here in the States I'll just stress again that if you need to make a gluten-free gravy you can try making your roux with rice flour or potato starch I do the rice flour because it's more opaque that makes a really delicious gravy nobody is gonna miss the wheat

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 548,268

Rating: 4.9280162 out of 5

Keywords: corn starch, corn flour, arrowroot starch, arrowroot, arrowroot powder, arrowroot flour, tapioca starch, tapioca flour, potato starch, rice flour, xanthan gum, agar, agar agar, gravy, how to make gravy without flour, gluten-free gravy, how to make gluten free gravy, gluten free sauces, kitchen experiments, taste test, gluten-free roux, flourless roux, flourless gravy, how to thicken a sauce, how to thicken a sauce with cornstarch, how to thicken a sauce with xanthan gum

Id: wndGXOoqRLs

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019