Why did my peanut butter sauce split?
I made a peanut butter sauce/marinade for some tofu bits, with peanut butter, soy sauce and pineapple juice. It tasted good and was the right creamy texture when I put the tofu in it. After a couple of hours it was still fine, and then I tossed it all in the frying pan. Within a minute or two, the sauce had split, and had lost most of its flavour. What parameter of the cooking am I getting wrong?
Best Answer
You need to 1) increase the emulsification, and 2) reduce the amount of time the sauce is very hot.
You can try adding honey or mustard to the sauce, that will improve emulsification. You can also hit it with a stick blender which will do a much better job of breaking it up than can be done by hand.
Also it may look ok after a few hours but who knows how much separation is starting to happen at a very small scale and will accelerate when it hits heat.
Add the sauce at the last possible moment before plating. It isn't going to benefit from cooking, and it isn't going to marinade into the cooked food, so don't have it in any longer than it takes for it to warm up. 20 seconds is probably all it will take.
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Quick Answer about "Why did my peanut butter sauce split?"
You need to 1) increase the emulsification, and 2) reduce the amount of time the sauce is very hot. You can try adding honey or mustard to the sauce, that will improve emulsification. You can also hit it with a stick blender which will do a much better job of breaking it up than can be done by hand.Why is my peanut butter sauce separating?
Finally, too high of heat during the cooking process can break the sauce, separating the oil from the rest of the ingredients. If this happens, don't panic. Simply lower the heat and whisk the sauce vigorously to reincorporate the oil.How do you fix curdled peanut sauce?
If the oil is separating from the sauce a bit (this can happen from the oil in the coconut milk and the peanut butter, but it's easy to fix!), add water a few drops at a time and whisk until it comes smoothly back together.How do you emulsify peanut sauce?
Once the peanut butter mixture is thinned to the consistency of, say, mayonnaise, you'll be able to add the rest of the liquids. It's the same principle when making gravy from flour, fat and broth. If you add all the broth at once to the roux, you'll end up with lumpy gravy.BoJack Horseman | The Full Story of Mr. Peanutbutter
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