Crazy8
Well-Known Member
So I cant seem to find an answer for this. In the distant past I had seen a root beer recipe or two that called for cream of tarter. What does cream of tarter do for the root beer?
I'm not sure how it would help with head retention. You need a protein for that.
Cream of tartar (or tartaric acid) is used to break up and stabilize table sugar (which is a disaccharide and is relatively low in sweetness) into its 2 component parts: fructose (considerably sweeter) and glucose. In cooking, this is referred to as "inverting" sugar. Critic acid is also a popular acid used for the same purpose.
Now with heating up the sugar for a long period of time before adding cream of tarter, I always add my brown sugar and other spices at the last 5 minutes of a boil. Is that long enough? For the sake of the sugar and sweetness, can I add the sugar sooner without any harm done to sweetenss and such?
I was going to post essentially the same thing as FlyingDucthman, it takes a good amount of heat and time to get the sugar to invert, it's best not to add anything else until it is inverted. You need enough water that the sugars won't caramelize or burn (you'll know if they do, add more water immediately if the solution starts to turn brown), but not so much that it won't get up to 240°F.
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