Calcium lactate

Lactate de calcium

What it is

The white specks that bloom on a wedge of aged cheddar are this same salt, crystallising out as the cheese loses water; graders learned long ago to read them as age rather than mould. Unlike calcium chloride it has almost no taste of its own, which is the only reason it can go inside the food rather than in a bath outside it.

In the kitchen

Stirred into a cucumber brine at about 0.5 % it keeps the slices snapping for months by cross-linking the pectin in the cell walls, and it does the same for apple or cherry going into a tart. For reverse spherification, blend 1 to 2 % into the base and drop that into a bath of alginate, never the other way round.

Goes with

Cucumber Yogurt Apple Cherry Dill Carrot Mustard seed

Same species

Calcium chloride Calcium lactate gluconate

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