One of the services my studio provides is indexing cookbooks. Having done it for more than ten years has given us a knack for snack alphabetizing. And adding some good recipes to our cooking corpus!
The first time I heard of xanthan gum must have been either in the Naomi Campbell 3-Ingredient Diet Cookbook or in some Keto Fest Cookazine.
R studio T was thrilled to finally allocate a food item to this letter sometimes vilified by moralists and mathematicians, but not musicians (I always loved xylophones). The x in xanthan though, sounds more like a slurry “z” than the cymbalic “ks” of words like foxy, flux, and sex. Carbophobes use xanthan gum to emulsify a sauce or as an alternative to cornstarch or flour when thickening. Our friend Norman explained to me that a bacteria called Xanthomonas campestris, a plant pest, is part of this ingredient. The formula is C36H58O29P2 just in case any of you, like Ms. Campbell, has a lab set up in your second home in Malindi, Kenya where you can make keto-friendly xanthan gum. (I’d rather make papier mâché with real flour.)
Indexing cookbooks is challenging when you have a limited amount of pages to fit the beast. Is it kosher to group kosher salt and sea salt in one category placing the least used in parentheses? Do you list chocolate fudge sauce under Chocolate (yum!) or under Sauce, surrounded by sodium-ridden bottled concoctions? Is fish sauce a condiment or a “sauce”? Having grown up in a binary house (white and brown when it came to sugar), I was delighted to embrace the polysyllabic demerara, muscovado, and turbinado kinds in baking cookbooks. Under what category would you list roux?
— New York City, 8/30/2021