You may be right! Apparently when cold it is fine
When heated it has 10g per tablespoon. I figure I have about 5g in a serving of meatballs. What I may do next time is add some other binders to it and only put in a little potato startch. I like the way the potato starch thickens the sauce and I guess I can eat the meatballs cold!
If you haven’t tried it, consider xanthan gum. Works great to thicken sauces and gravies. The only tricky thing is that you want to add it a little bit at a time and wait while stirring. Too much can make things a little gummy.
Was going to suggest the same thing.
I use it sometimes and it really does work. I try to “dust” what I’m adding it to, a lot like you might try to dust something with powdered sugar, and stir vigorously.
With the caveat that I’m neither a chemist nor a chef, I see these as serving different purposes.
Sodium citrate acts as an emulsifier, primarily (at least in the KF recipes) for making a smooth cheese sauce. I’ve used it with a variety of cheeses, and have generally had great results, though like xanthan gum, it can take a while to come together. I do find that it’s pretty forgiving, unlike xanthan gum, so if you get the proportions wrong with sodium citrate, you can usually add more cheese, or more water, to get the consistency you want.
Xanthan gum is more for thickening, and the way I typically use it is to take pan drippings, add some fat and more liquid if needed (melted butter, heavy cream, etc.), and use my stick mixer to blend them up, while simmering to cook the mixture down to thicken naturally. Once fully blended, I may add xanthan gum to get a little more thickness while preserving the volume of the liquid.
The one place I can potentially see sodium citrate being useful for a gravy is in preventing separation. I usually find that even a well-blended gravy can suffer separation once I refrigerate the leftovers. But I’ve never tried using sodium citrate this way, so I can’t vouch for whether it would work, or if there would be undesirable side effects. I may give it a try the next time I do gravy.
That’s kind of what I was thinking. I use sodium citrate in cheese sauces, but I was thinking of what would happen if i also added xantham gum. Would it be a well-blended cheese sauce, but just thicker?
I used to follow alot of the resistant starch threads a long time ago on freetheanimal.com, so my memory on this is somewhat spotty. That being said, I do not believe resistant starch has any significant or measurable impact on blood glucose levels. Somewhat counterintuitive, I know, but this is apparently why (in theory):
See also:
That is what I thought which is why I was using it in meatballs (to hold the meatballs together more than to thicken the sauce) but the article I quoted said that is only true if it is cold. If it is heated it has the same carbs as regular potatoes, since I am not planning to serve the meatballs raw I am reconsidering it.
@devhammer this is not so much for the sauce but to hold the meatballs together (I usually make them with meat, some type of lower carb starch or flour and eggs and do not cook them before throwing them in hot sauce) . Would xanthum gum serve that purpose or can you suggest something else
Good point about heating. I forgot that there’s something significant with the heating and then cooling process that makes RS ok to consume, carb-wise, once cooled.
I’ve not tried it myself, but I know many folks have used crushed pork rinds as a breadcrumb substitute for meatloaf and meatballs.
Here we go again…
So I haven’t full read this yet, and it seems like it might be positive. But she characterized the diet kind of wrong right? 50 g or less, body goes into starvation mode… Not exactly, not starvation, just different fuel. I know she is appealing to the masses, and some inaccuracy might be a concession in the effort to educate more people, but "starvation: is definitely poor word choice because it solicits fear mongering.