First, some quotes. (Let's see if we can confuse the website's pre-processor! WooHoo!)
Redzed wrote:
Bob K wrote:
On the Alcohol that seems to be a problem with sausage making, why not simmer and remove the alcohol from the wine......the taste will remain.
Bob that makes a heck of a lot of sense because that is what we do when we cook with wine. But I wonder whether evaporating the alcohol out of the wine removes the acids as well? I had a similar result with the texture back in Project B1 when I made chorizo with the addition of vinegar.
Then, Ssorlih wrote:
I believe that ethanol boils at about 175°F so you could heat it in a double boiler arrangement and be certain that you were not over heating it.
Bob K wrote back
Chris-
Ph of alcohol is neutral (7) and contains no sugars so I doubt it will effect the overall Ph
Redzed next.
Yes but wine itself has a pH of 4 or less, therefore high in acid. And I think that not only alcohol but acidity also prevents the meat from binding.
Back to Bob K:
Well if you think the acidity is effecting the sausage you could try to use a base like baking soda to lower the Ph of the wine.
On the other hand with fermented sausages the lower Ph seems to firm up and bind the meat.
Then Igor Duńczyk jumped in with some European context.
As in Clint Eastwood`s famous line, "Go ahead, Punk- - make my day," here`s a bit of punk-level chemical engineering. (Eeewww!)
Ross has it right when commenting on ethanol boiling at a lower temperature than water. Compounds tend to evaporate preferentially in order of boiling point. The lower-temperature ones come off first. (There`s a phenomenon called "vapor pressure"- - when a substance`s vapor pressure equals the surrounding pressure, it boils, displacing the surrounding gas, which in our case usually is air.) Because volatile substances like ethanol/water/acetic acid exhibit some sort of vapor pressure (which you might call, "tendency to boil"), what actually comes off is a mixture of the volatile stuff. The gas that comes off is richer in the more volatile stuff and poorer in the less volatile stuff than the liquid is, which is how distillation works. ...and because a mixture comes off, rather than the pure compounds, distillers often have to use several distillation steps to purify what they really want, avoiding the stuff that they really DON`T want.
...for example, methanol is in that first amount to come over when you distill a fermented beverage, so you normally throw away this "fore cut," even though there is some loss of ethanol. Likewise, the higher alcohols, "fusel oil," come over last if you push it too far and don`t stop collecting the distillation "mid cut" in time. The non-export-grade Russian vodkas used to be that way, and Russian friends have told me that they used to put ground pepper into their vodka to try to absorb the stuff. It`s too bad, because the fusel oil gave the rot-gut stuff a certain flavor that... well... it was good, but what a headache the next day! In a sense, it`s too bad that the FDA or the USDA or whoever is the biggest Big Brother in the alcoholic beverage business these days regulates vodka composition to exclude all the tasty stuff, but then, maybe it`s a good idea after all.
So, back to our thread. Quoting Bob K:
"Well if you think the acidity is effecting the sausage you could try to use a base like baking soda to lower the Ph of the wine.
"On the other hand with fermented sausages the lower Ph seems to firm up and bind the meat."
Sorry, Bob. Adding a base RAISES pH. The definition of pH is "minus log (base 10) of hydrogen ion content," which (if you dig out your old Algebra II book) says that, the higher the hydrogen ion content, the smaller the pH. It`s because of that pesky minus sign. Putting a base into the mixture chews up hydrogen ion, lowering its concentration, which raises the pH. Minus log(10) of 1, which is to say, pure hydrogen ion, would be a pH of zero. At the other end of the scale, minus Log(10) of zero is pretty small, call it 10 to the minus 14.
As to the "fermented, lower ph" bit, I`ll have to refer you to elsewhere in the forum. There was an excellent discussion on protein binding by that master of tall tales and technical technique, Chuckwagon, about how meat binding works. Early on in my participation on this forum, I wondered the same thing- - why adding vinegar to my chorizo resulted in a lack of binding. Try using the site's search function to find the discussion. It's well worth your while.
Seems like the answer by CW (after some technical explanation) and several others about how to tackle the problem was "Well... it just DOES" and "Deal with it." Perhaps the compaction that comes from reducing water content in fermented, semi-dry or dry sausages is what you are thinking of, rather than binding.
At any rate, thanks for questioning. That`s how we all learn. Keep up the good work.
{Which baking soda would do). It seems the abrupt lowering of the Ph is a problem with the wine.