{"id":58,"date":"2007-03-18T08:39:45","date_gmt":"2007-03-18T13:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=58"},"modified":"2007-03-18T08:39:45","modified_gmt":"2007-03-18T13:39:45","slug":"what-did-i-do-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/?p=58","title":{"rendered":"What did I do wrong?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe I can pull a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jwz.org\">jwz<\/a> and ask my readers for help &mdash; cooking help!  Perhaps even the <a href=\"http:\/\/hackerkitchen.org\/zh\/\">Hacker Kitchen<\/a> can advise me.<\/p>\n<p>So there I was, making a simple hot salmon mousse, and the cookbook explains how to make a nice sauce to dribble over it:<\/p>\n<p><em>Melt 2 Tbsp butter in a nonstick saucepan.  Dilute 2 tsp cornstarch into 1\/2 cup milk, then add gradually to the melted butter over low-medium heat, while stirring continuously.  Add 1\/2 cup dry white wine, salt, pepper, and continue to stir until sauce thickens.  Remove it from the heat, stir in 2 beaten egg yolks and lemon rind gradually, whisking fast until the sauce is even and smooth. [&#8230;]<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Seems easy enough, doesn&#8217;t it?  I melted the butter, then thoroughly mixed the cornstarch into some milk and added the milk to the butter.  But when I added the wine &mdash; bam!  Instant curdling.  I ended up with a big lumpy, gooey mass in the middle of the sauce.  I couldn&#8217;t tell if it was coagulated milk solids (reacting to the acidity of the wine), or if it was the cornstarch, or some combination of the two.  I was so frustrated that I tossed the whole sauce, and repeated the whole experiment using skim milk (rather than whole milk).  Exact same results.  So I guess milkfat wasn&#8217;t coagulating;  it must have been either the milk proteins or the cornstarch.<\/p>\n<p>Mind you, I&#8217;m no spring chicken when it come to cornstarch.  I remember my naive days of trying to mix cornstarch into a big bowl of soy sauce, and getting &#8216;clumps&#8217;, and then learning how to dissolve it first in a teeny bit of sauce.  But this whole experience has bewildered me.<\/p>\n<p>Cooks, what&#8217;s going on here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe I can pull a jwz and ask my readers for help &mdash; cooking help! Perhaps even the Hacker Kitchen can advise me. So there I was, making a simple hot salmon mousse, and the cookbook explains how to make a nice sauce to dribble over it: Melt 2 Tbsp butter in a nonstick saucepan. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.red-bean.com\/sussman\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}