liquid, and instead merely give it some body.
Acids and Salt Tenderize There’s no truth to
the common saying that acidity and salt
“toughen” egg proteins. Acids and salt do
pretty much the same thing to egg proteins.
They get the proteins together sooner, but they
don’t let them get as close together. That is,
acids and salt make eggs thicken and
coagulate at a lower cooking temperature, but
actually produce a more tender texture.
The key to this seeming paradox is the
negative electrical charge that most of the egg
proteins carry, and that tends to keep them at
a distance from each other. Acids — cream of
tartar, lemon juice, or the juice of any fruit or
vegetable — lower the pH of the egg, and thus
diminish the proteins’ mutually repelling
negative charge. Similarly, salt dissolves into
positively and negatively charged ions that
cluster around the charged portions of the
proteins and effectively neutralize them. In