I’m a Lazy Home Cook—This One Ingredient Makes Me Look Like a Pro

I consider myself first and foremost a home cook, which means my toolkit does not necessarily overlap with that of the modernist chefs making cheese foams or turning pan sauces into spheres. One thing we do have in common: an unhealthy reliance on xanthan gum.

Xanthan gum—the powdered thickener that stabilizes store-bought ice creams and gives body to bottled salad dressings—has an outdated reputation as a fussy or industrial ingredient. I contend that it's not just for avant-garde cooks doing laboratory experiments; It's also for lazy home cooks. 

I know this because I am a lazy home Cook who has broken emulsions, under-reduced sauces, and miscalculated the roux needed to thicken the gravy at Thanksgiving. In all those cases, xanthan gum has been a culinary life-preserver. 

Even if you've never made a kitchen mistake (I don't believe you), xanthan gum still deserves a place in your pantry. Read on for a user-friendly way to incorporate this not-so-mysterious powder into your cooking—no jeweler's scale required.

What Is Xanthan Gum?

Xanthan gum, like the yeast in your pantry, is a product of microbial fermentation: Specifically, it’s made by fermenting simple sugars, such as glucose or sucrose, with the bacterium Xanthomonas campestris, which is a beautiful name for a baby. Formally, xanthan gum is a hydrocolloid, meaning it interacts with water to form a gel, much like agar, gelatin, or cornstarch. More casually, it's a thickener that can stabilize emulsions, pad out pan sauces, and help batter better adhere to fried foods. 

But xanthan gum has some advantages over other thickeners and emulsifiers. Unlike gelatin, it's vegan, making it accessible to a variety of cooks. Unlike agar, it doesn't require heat for activation—meaning it can thicken fresh fruit or herb purees without altering their delicate flavors. And with exponentially stronger thickening power than cornstarch, xanthan can be added in ghostly quantities. You're unlikely to taste it in any solution, unless you're adding enough to turn your sauce into Flubber.

Where to Find Xanthan Gum

Although xanthan gum has been on the market for more than 60 years, it's become much easier to find in retail settings recently, thanks to its use in gluten-free flours, where it helps strengthen protein networks. Today, you can find xanthan gum in many grocery stores (try looking for a Bob’s Red Mill display), although it's also readily available online.

How Home Cooks Can Use Xanthan Gum

One of the easiest ways to get started with xanthan gum is to use it to stabilize cold sauces and salad dressings. A tiny pinch in my homemade taco sauce keeps it from separating, even if I forget about it in the fridge for a week. Blending just a sprinkle into simple oil-and-vinegar salad dressings helps them cling to every lettuce leaf—even without the emulsifying power of mustard.

You can get more creative from there. A fractional amount of xanthan gum allows you to thicken a homemade mayonnaise, keep whipped cream from weeping for days, and turn any poaching liquid into a glossy glaze.

One of its most underappreciated qualities might be its ability to improve the adhesion of batter to fried foods. Xanthan gum has shear-thinning properties, which is another way of saying that a xanthan-enhanced batter will look thin while you're actively blending or agitating it, but thicken at rest. That's ideal for a batter that can evenly coat foods without streaming off them on the way to the fryer.

Tips for Using Xanthan Gum—Without Turning Gravy Into Jell-O

In powdered form, xanthan gum requires a little special handling. The powder won't evenly disperse in liquids with just a spoon or a whisk—you need a blender or immersion blender to fully dissolve and hydrate the xanthan gum and prevent unsightly clumps. 

But perhaps the key drawback of xanthan gum is that its potency requires you to Do Math. Most recipes using xanthan gum call for a fractional amount—a scant 1/8 teaspoon, say, or 0.1% of a solution's weight. That typically requires both a highly sensitive scale and a reasonable faculty for numbers. I once accidentally turned a beautiful batch of fermented hot sauce into aspic because I missed a decimal point. 

To get around those constraints, I adopt a technique borrowed from high-end restaurant kitchens: pre-mixing xanthan into a solution slangily known as "pre-hy" (for “pre-hydrated”).

To make pre-hy, I use the same ratio as Thomas Keller's recipe from The French Laundry, Per Se, but scaled down for a home cook. Using an upright or immersion blender, shear 10 grams of xanthan gum into 500 grams of water. Start your blender on low and slowly increase the speed to full power, until the powder is completely incorporated and the mixture forms a smooth, continuous vortex in your blender. 

The resulting solution can be spooned into sauces or gravies in more reasonable quantities, shrinking the margin for error. It is also, I must disclose, quite gross. When mixed correctly, the pre-hy will have a texture I can only describe as "snot gruel."

But who among us has not experienced the wonder of transforming something mucilaginous (okra! seaweed! eels!) into something magical and delicious? Whether it's powdered or pre-hy, I maintain xanthan gum belongs in your pantry. It's not prissy—it's the closest thing the culinary world has to a panacea. 

There's almost nothing a little snot gruel can't fix.