Thanksgiving 2012
Tips and tricks from the Food section on cooking a turkey, White House recipes and more.
(Illustration by alex eben meyer / ) -
Is this a cause for alarm, a reason to throw away our poultry skins? Not when they are considered a delicacy in many less-paranoid parts of the world. Are Jews of Eastern European heritage going to give up their gribenes or grieven — crisp chicken-skin cracklings, a kosher version of pork chicharrones? Or the Japanese their torikawa — crisp grilled chicken skin? Must I stop stripping the skin from the breast of a rotisserie chicken and eating it first?
Never. Not over a lousy 3 grams of fat.
Cranberry sauce
What makes cranberries gel?
One word: pectin.
Pectin is a complex carbohydrate (a polysaccharide) found mainly in the cell walls of fruits and certain other parts of plants. Apples, citrus rinds and cranberries are particularly high in pectin.
When an acid is present, pectin reacts with sugar to form a gel, a homogeneous dispersion of water molecules throughout a molecular network within the solid carbohydrate. The resulting substance has jellylike properties. It behaves somewhat like a liquid, yet holds its shape when cooled, like a solid.
As in most chemical reactions, pectin and sugar must be present in a certain proportion for the conversion to occur properly. The right proportions, by weight, are one part sugar and one part water to two parts cranberries. For example, 6 ounces (about 3 / 4 cup) each of sugar and water to a 12-ounce bag of cranberries. The berries themselves contain the necessary acid. Insufficient sugar, in particular, can lead to a sauce that won’t gel, and you may wind up with cranberry soup.
Too much water — more than is necessary to dissolve the sugar and hydrate the pectin — also will keep the sauce from setting. An easy way to fix soupy sauce is to cook it longer to evaporate excess water. Just remember that it won’t “set up” until it has cooled so the melted gel solidifies. (Strictly speaking, the words “melt” and “solid” don’t apply to gels.) But be careful: If you cook the sauce too long, you’ll wind up with red rubber.
Hint: The directions on a bag of fresh cranberries can’t be beat.
At a White House Thanksgiving, tradition is a presidential thing
Thanksgiving recipes from the White House
Taste Test: Heritage turkey breeds
Thanksgiving turkey prep primer
Wolke is a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh and a former Food section columnist.
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