they’re raw or cooked.
Plant Particles: Coarse
and Inefficient Thickeners
Compared to the other ways of thickening,
simple pureeing tends to produce a coarse
sauce that more readily separates into solid
particles and thin fluid. The solid fragments
of plant cell walls are clumps of many
thousands of carbohydrate and protein
molecules. If those molecules were dispersed
separately and finely throughout the fluid —
as gelatin or starch molecules are in other
sauces — they would bind many more water
molecules, get tangled up in each other, and
be far too small for the tongue to detect as
particles. But plant-cell fragments range from
0.01 to 1 millimeter across; they give a grainy
impression on the tongue and they’re far less
efficient than individual molecules at binding
water or interfering with fluid flow. And