INGREDIENT: Sodium Citrate

COOKING USE: Spherification, but also an emulsifying salt. This salt of citric acid is often used to soften “hard” water to aid spherification; if your water or liquid has too much calcium in it, you won’t be able to get things to successfully spherify.

It’s also the secret to a great fondue, in which you want cheese that melts smoothly and not into lumps. The mark of a ruined fondue is separation: curd that burns on the bottom of your pot and a slick of oil floating on top.

Traditionally, this was fixed in Switzerland by using low-quality, overly tart wine (high citric acid) that loosened up casein proteins, helping to keep the fondue emulsified and smooth.

Luckily, it’s hard to find wine sufficiently bad anymore. Now the solution is what built the Kraft empire: sodium citrate. James Kraft used citrate as a melting salt to make it easy to cast cheese into cans and then sterilize the cans so that the cheese could be shipped unrefrigerated. Emulsifying salts are why Velveeta melts as smoothly as it does. But you can make your own Velveeta using real cheese. It’s easy:

• Shred your favorite hard cheese. If you’re using a really mature cheese like a hard Parmesan, you should blend it with a softer, mild cheese for the best results.
• Add a small amount of water or wine to a pot, add about 0.5% the weight of the cheese in sodium citrate to the liquid, and heat to dissolve.
• Add the cheese a little at a time and stir until it all melts.
• When the cheese is melted, you can adjust the consistency by adding more liquid to make it thinner, or you can pour the molten cheese into a mold, wait for it to harden, and then slice it into your own singles.

SPORTS/HEALTH USE: Ingested by some athletes 90 minutes prior to race time for events 2–15 minutes in duration. Orally dosed sodium citrate (often at 0.5 g per kg body weight) quickly degrades into sodium bicarbonate—baking soda—which has been demonstrated to improve performance in events 1–7 minutes in length.

Empirically, I can say that there are high responders who see great endurance gains and nonresponders who see nothing at all. For anyone who tries it, use it near a bathroom the first time. It can cause rapid evacuation, if you catch my drift.

Sodium citrate is hard to find at GNC, but the Internet provideth.