Xanthan Gum Primer: Diving into Ratios and Synergies. WTF - Ep. 302

do you have xanthan gum in your pantry and would like to learn how to get the most out of your xanthan well today on w chef we're going to take you through a full xanthan gum primer and even show you how to make a great flexible avocado gel for a poke ball [Music] hello and welcome to wtf where we transform food here in the modernist pantry test kitchen i'm chef scott garan and i'm janie wang one of the owners of modernist pantry here on wtf every week we talk about unique ingredients techniques and show you recipes for your kitchen so remember to subscribe and stick around for our weekly giveaway this week we are doing a xanthan gum primer where we will show you how to use xanthan gum in the right ratios for your recipe as well as some cool synergies that it has with other types of gums and where we want to start with scott is uh what exactly is xanthan gum good question i think i was one of these ingredients that's you know becoming more and more well known but people don't necessarily know where it comes from and it's actually very simple it's mostly found on broccoli and cauliflower and what they do is they take this little bacteria and they grow it on sugar so it's microbial microbially grown that's a rough one and uh it's basically grown on sugar and they harvest it they dry it and they powderize it so that it can be used as a thickener so it's a relatively natural ingredient it has a name you know like xanthan so people immediately will say oh what is that i've never heard of that but it's very you know natural and it can be used to thicken just about anything in extremely low quantities that's a great aspect of xanthan gum it uses very very little yeah and because dan then is i would say one of the few products that we carry that you can find in a grocery store and is relatively commonly accessible we do get a lot of questions around xanthan usage and a common complaint would be that oh i try to use anthem but everything came out really snotty can you talk to you're just on my ratios can you talk about what are the recommendations and why do people experience that snottiness so i always recommend people start at point one percent of the total weight of whatever it is you're making so point one percent if let's say if you're making a quart of water we'll just say you know water for for this it's going to be one gram that you're going to use so for a thousand grams basically in that quart one gram of xanthan gum is a great starting point is that going to be perfect no but this is what one percent will get you right it is absolutely you know so that's point one percent sorry yes point one percent will get you a little bit of viscosity added to just about anything and it's very simple to use uh and we'll show that off in a little bit yeah and what do you think and before we go into this i think um we have a lot of gums what are the benefits of using damp dan as a thickener versus other gums uh one of the benefits is cost use such a small amount right the cost is going to be something that oh i can have this one bag of xanthan and have it last a while right or maybe i love it and i use it in a million different things it's not going to run out really quickly uh and you're going to get you know the best bang for your buck with how much it thickens at such a low amount that's a really great thing so we're not having to use you know 10 20 grams when you can use half a gram sometimes you know yeah i know a little while ago we did a we did an episode it was all about salad dressings we'll link to that at the end of this episode so you can check it out but we use anthony in a variety of dressings and one of the things that i really like that you that you did with it is that you said um you know xanthan really coated the leaves of the salad dressing really well what is that so that's uh that's a word called thixotropic maybe maybe it will appear here uh it's a great little word which basically means that when it's flowing or poured it becomes very fluid or when it's stationary it uh it holds its shape a lot better so sometimes you get thickened a lot and you can end up with something that literally looks like a gel until it starts to be poured and then it's more fluid but when you add it to a salad dressing one it has um surfactant quality so it can coat and hold on to the the dressing itself but when you put it onto the leaves it stays put it doesn't end up at the bottom of a you know a container or you know if you make a salad and bring it to lunch you don't have all your dressing in the bottom it stays where it is on the leaves and it's really nice for that not just presentation but consistency throughout yeah and one of the other things we definitely want to cover today would be synergies but before we get to that i think um well i want to get back to the snottiness because it's so it's such a common complaint that people think xanthan is bad because everything you make with it comes out snotty can you talk about that some more sure i like to use the word um mucilaginous so so so it's kind of just like a slickness and that comes from overuse whenever you use too much you're going to get a stringy a stringier texture a snottier texture all that but that's just from overuse so if you stay at the lower uses you're just going to get the thickening properties uh and anything higher you're really going to end up with that kind of slick uh sticky mouthfeel so if we just go through these really quick that was 0.1 that's a very small amount okay here we have point three and you can immediately see yeah it holds a bead a lot better when we're pouring it but it's still fluid completely fluid when we go up to point five percent right you get a little bit more of it sticking to that spoon the drops are a little bit bigger and you can already see this was made two days ago and it's still holding on to those air bubbles right we go up to 0.7 now we're getting into that territory where it's starting to look eerily like it's not yeah not the most appetizing way to put it but this is just i would never really go above point five percent but some people do they go up to one percent which you have here and this right that's the thixotropic uh quality of it is that it it flows and then it sets right and it flows and it sets and it has that really like slimy kind of feel to it and then this is wild overuse i did two percent and you can absolutely see right like you don't want to use that and there's a lot of ingredients that are used at two percent so some people may get it and say oh this teaspoon looks like enough when that teaspoon is seven eight times the amount that you actually need so that's where it comes from because we're used to adding teaspoons and tablespoons of things whereas if you use this and teaspoons and tablespoons you better have a big batch right so yup and if you're someone who loves to go into the store and read the back of the labels and see what's in there you're going to see xanthan gum in a lot of things because we just need salad dressings but it's like in soup it's such a general thickener soup sauces ice creams a lot of times it's in it's like a lot a lot of different foods and all right so i love that you just covered and show people exactly what happens when you overuse it and you know trying not to go above that point five percent so if someone has a recipe and they're like i want to see what zanthan gum can do for my recipe what do you recommend for using the gum properly so i would always weigh i always do it by weight it's going to be the best way weigh your recipe and then figure out how much you're you're going to need and i always start at that point one percent especially if it's something that's going to be cold because i can add that point one percent taste it feel it maybe put it on something go i need a little bit more and then go up because you can always add you can't take away so if you're developing something or you're trying to just make your salad dressing better your ice cream better start low and then work your way up to uh you know higher amounts i did the exact same thing first time i even used ant and gum about a decade ago my chef said put an eighth of a teaspoon in there i did i love the ice cream so i put a half a teaspoon it's got to be better more is more right more is better then it just was just stringy it was awful it wasted a ton of you know ice cream so now i know to you know weigh and really kind of figure out exactly what you need for your recipe before you just start adding it because that's where people are going to run into these issues and then they're going to be put off by the ingredient where the ingredient is still great it just was misused yeah and the other question that we get a lot here is you know i'm trying to use anthem but when i dump it into the liquid it's clumping what's happening look at that i got a little demo so people put things we didn't plan this at all completely spontaneous people just put things into recipes right and they just add it in and sometimes you read the recipe and you're like oh i know how to make this right and you just put the xanthan right in right so and then you go to mix it up well xanthan loves water it loves it more than you and i do so it creates basically an immediate reaction around the xanthan itself so everything in here is still powder and i can't really break it up and even if i put it into a blender sometimes this just mixes around yeah sometimes if i'm making something like an ice cream i can't afford to just put it into a blender until it's completely broken up because i'm going to turn my ice cream into butter right so you really want to make sure that you're adding it either to another dry ingredient such as like sugar gently sprinkling it in or if you want to be able to whisk it in really easily you must then go from xanthan gum to perfected xanthan gum and that's uh pretty much like a key ingredient if you're going to be using same thing then yeah so we love perfectos and them because specifically you can with hand whisk it versus high shirt blender and there's a lot less dust so for this week's giveaway we are giving away a bag of the perfecta xanthan so that you can try it out in your recipes and to enter to win just leave in the comments below um actually one of the things i really love because people leave comments all the time is that someone left a comment they say you know we love it when you do something in-depth well well we wish that you did multiple episodes of it as opposed to doing one episode and jumping around from topic to topic so tender to win this week's giveaway leave in the comments below something that you would like to see us cover in depth over multiple episodes and do a little story arc around it all right so back to you scott so quickly yeah if you're going to be using perfected xanthan gum it's a one-to-one replacement for weight so you don't have to change your ratio uh it's just um going to be easier to mix in you can whisk it in i would still try to you know dump it in slowly because you just don't want to have any clumps but it's so much less prone to clumping that it's it's worth having in your cabinet so let's move this out of the way i think one thing that people sometimes ask us is you know i don't want to have like 50 different hydrocolloids i really just want a few and xanthan is definitely one it's so multi-purpose that you're going to want to have it in your pantry because you can put into a lot of different stuff which brings me to my next question which is um you know one of the things we love about xanthan is that it has a lot of synergies with other types of gums can you talk more about what exactly that means so synergies are basically you're taking two ingredients and when you add them together they create something that's more than the sum of their parts so basically xanthan has the ability to work with a lot of ingredients and create gels that don't already make gel so thickeners we have a number of them here with three different types that you can make a gel out of xanthan and another thickener on top of that you can then take it and you can make a foam with it so if you we have an ingredient that that contains xanthan and contains a type of methyl cellulose and it's called foam magic we can make that right now okay this is the best foaming agent if you've watched wtf for a long time you've seen us use this because we love it so basically i can add this directly in and if you have a hand blender make sure nice and charged so i can blend it in you can see how fluffy this is this is already similar to the perfected xanthan so it's going to mix in really easily if i mix this up and i incorporate a lot of air i have a foam that i can then take and put on top of a cocktail on top of a dessert on top of a number of different things that's going to be stable for a very very long time yeah because we have a lot of different foaming agents as well but the xanthan and methyl cellular combination i think i forget what was the longest we ever tried to hold this phone like so we brought it to a trade show and we had like hours for like yeah a few hours just you know constantly making them and it always works and it's really great and this amount of foam you know just the 200 grams i have here can make dozens and dozens of whatever dish you are because you can continuously foam it and make more all right so that's always one of our favorite things to do but let's talk about these gels what type of gels do we have here so we have six different types the first three are just a one to one uh xanthan with a different um gum so so the first one is a locus bean gum so it's uh xanthan gum it's a 60 40 blend 60 locus bean and 40 um xanthan and you can see it's uh it makes the gel those are two thickening agents that make a gel so that basically thickeners and you can see when we try to spread it it has like really good elasticity yeah it's really nice and elastic it's a little opaque but that's totally fine but if you were to make like a custard or whatnot this is great for um you know like plant-based alternatives and things like that so you get that little bit of it almost feels like a custard but it's not the next one is a konjac gum this one is really nice because konjac is another like extreme thickener thickens so well it's such a small amount that this is and all these are around one percent of the total weight of the um the recipe so this is a uh 70 kanjak and 30 xanthan and this makes like a real creamy like it really breaks down and it's nice and we'll get to a recipe in a little bit the next is guar and xanthan and this makes a nice it's a very light gel you can go into higher ratios and make it solidify i didn't want to go too much because i wanted to keep them all consistent at that percent but you can make it go to the point where it does solidify and make an extremely elastic gel as we go into the next ones all three of these are agar xanthan and a thickener well the first one is just agar and xanthan and what that does is one it helps uh prevent cineresis so you don't get as much water leaking out which is a great thing because a lot of the times just with an agar gel you would absolutely have water already on yeah these are totally dry we were kind of moving them around a little bit and we were like oh de-star those are nice and set so they're set yeah and then also it gives it a bit of elasticity because agar is a very uh brittle gel so it gives it a little bit of elasticity so if you want a different texture out of it let's say you're making a plant-based like jell-o or whatever you can use this mixture then as we go through if you want to cut them janie i'll give you a fresh one so that first one is just the agar and xanthan you can kind of see uh it's going to be soft but still brittle but it has a little bit of elastic especially when you when you eat it you're going to notice a difference i'm trying to cut it without like rolling it all around i don't know how you were smooshing those other gels but this one's definitely brittle the thickeners will stick a little bit better yeah when we go down we're going to have the agar konjac and um xanthan so that's a mixture that we actually used for a great recipe here oh this one is very firm yes the fur wow and these are all at the same so there's a difference in texture you can also see there's a difference almost like in uh texture on the outside of it a little bit like softer like granules in there but it makes it a creamier gel that's a great shot you can definitely see it's definitely like a creamier gel and that comes from the konjac and then down the end is the locust bean gum xanthan and agar and that one i find to be very firm very firm very firm there's a little bit of elasticity to it not as much as the second one but all three of these are used in a number of different recipes but they're all the same ratio and you end up with three different well at this point six different types of gel out of the same things yeah so if you're trying to develop a recipe you have almost like infinite combinations of what you can do with these right and this is only at one one uh ratio so you can play with them and alter them and say oh i want a little bit softer okay i'm gonna increase the xanthan gum i'm gonna lower the agar all of these are able to be kind of uh you know customized but you have a number of options here and then almost infinite i'm sure there's a number on it but almost infinite amounts that you can play with and figure out okay this is going to be the best for my specific recipe and this is just a select few but there's so many more that can go so we actually made a great recipe using one of those the konjac agar and xanthan okay well we're excited to do that and uh so people are writing all the time and say i want to do xyz what is the best ratio and we're always like uh here are some starting ideas good luck because you know you're like off the top of your head scott yeah give me the ratios i can give you a starting point but really it's gonna without my hands on it and a number of testing it's impossible to say like sometimes sometimes a lot of testing don't get discouraged if you don't get it the first time all right what what did you make today for us to try all right so i made a uh it's a avocado gel so this is based on a foie gras knot but instead of doing foie gras we wanted to use something like avocado so we can use it on more more items and it's a little bit more affordable so basically it's that konjac agar and xanthan gum gel and what we do is we emulsify with water avocado a little bit of ascorbic acid so it keeps that beautiful green color and butter so it's really rich really fatty and it's just going to be almost like decadent but then you can do cool things like you can tie it into a knot wow so basically you make the gel let it cool tie it into a knot you can have some really cool presentations uh like that i've also had it to the point where i can pipe it and it sets in its place and you can then take it and use it on a number of different things but if you wanted to try just a little bit it's very mild it's just avocado forward there's a little bit of acidity from the ascorbic acid a little bit of salt but when you're going to be putting it on something it's going to be just that much better is very rich you know like i want to say almost like avocado ice cream if you make ice cream with straight butter yeah yeah pretty much right yeah and we weren't able to really like do this particular part on camera but if you're interested in seeing it we're going to have a reel up later this week or maybe they're called shorts whatever they're called these days it's going to be up on this channel you can see scott making the avocado knot yes this is so i mean it's really good like it's super creamy but it's definitely a less is more type of thing oh yeah it's it's an accompaniment it's almost like a solid sauce right yeah so you put it on top and as you mix it through it's going like those thixotropic features as it warms up it's going to mix in it it's we'll call it a solid sauce because that's good alliteration right so i have a little bit of sushi rice here and we're gonna make a poke bowl where we have an avocado not set on top so i'm gonna start with just some tuna so this is a nice bluefin tuna that we have you put it right down the center we're going to put the avocado knot right on top because we want it to stand out we did all that work for it so why not make it shine okay so you have some edamame you can put anything on your your poke balls but we want to make sure that we get a lot of color kimchi a lot of freshness i like a lot of kimchi you sure do i do i love me some kimchi and that brings a good amount of acidity especially when we're going to have something as rich as the avocado yep so i'm going to put on some pea shoots and some cilantro i like cilantro as well and then some peanuts there you can use anything you want if you like uh the crispy shallots those are awesome i love doughs i love those too yeah but i do say like because this this particular recipe it's so fatty that you do need like a good amount of acidity to offset it acidity and salt to really kind of you know like you said offset it that was the best word for it yeah i think when we were doing r d scott did one that was like an almond butternut and i just took a bite of ours like oh that is intense it was intense like a good but i was like i ate too much of this so we have the knot right on top and then i'm just going to put on so this is some chili oil soy sauce mirin and just put it around maybe a little bit on the but we have a beautiful poke bowl here that has tons of flavor and we got a beautiful presentation something different that pretty much you're not going to see anywhere but you can make it ahead of time you don't have to worry about your avocados browning because the ascorbic acid you know negates that it's going to be really beautiful and it'll bring it up to the next level yeah well i think we've covered a lot today all about xanthan and hopefully you found it interesting and you know you want to make some fun really like buttery knots they're delicious and exciting to do and you can check out these recipes and of course all of our other content in the links in the description below so until next week from here in a modernist pantry test kitchen i'm janie wang and i'm scott garan [Music]

Channel: Kitchen Alchemy from Modernist Pantry

Views: 13,533

Keywords: Modernist Pantry, Kitchen Alchemy, Modernist Cuisine, Molecular Gastronomy, Avacado, Poke Bowl, Homemade Poke Bowl, Poke Bowl Recipe, Xanthan, Xanthan Gum, Xanthan Gum Usage, Xanthan Usage, What is Xanthan Gum, What is Xanthan, Locust Bean Gum, Guar Gum, Konjac Gum, Agar, Super Agar, Foam, Foam Magic, Salad Dressing

Id: 1vokIpNfvUs

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2022