https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof/article/37/4/044122/3345324/Phase-behavior-of-Cacio-e-Pepe-sauce
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This is great (although I didn’t really read it for scientific rigor). A few years back I remember ATK or Milk Street had a brief article on making pasta water from scratch with starch and maybe I screwed something up but it was terrible.
I like that this article included a recipe at the end for both more traditional starch stabilized sauce as well as sodium citrate. I’ve tried both methods before but without the precision of the starch percentage. Like they say in the article, any nonna could do this without needing this information but I’m not that good.
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I got the link from this https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2025/06/11/cacio-e-pepe-butter-olive-oil/ which includes a more practical recipe.
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Making random associations: I think I saw an Epicurious video recently where Frank Proto (who I really like) used sodium citrate in a mac and cheese (no bake) sauce…
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Yeah, sodium citrate works fantastic for fresher cheeses (as long as you’re not looking for the cheese pull) but it doesn’t work quite as well for aged cheeses so that was kind of a bonus from this article.
I was curious what other fresher melted cheese applications there were besides queso, mac and cheese, fondue, DIY American cheese etc. so last year I made a caprese flavor profile mozzarella queso with tomato water and basil. Flavor was fantastic but I didn’t really think about the color which was a very unappetizing grey with a touch of pink…
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Sodium citrate works fine on aged cheese for me in the sense that it turns Reggiano or Pecorino Romano into liquid. I guess you could use flour or potato starch or whatever to thicken it so it would stick nicely to pasta.
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It does work but not at the same percentage as for fresh cheeses. I can’t remember the specifics but it has something to do with proteins being more broken down in aged cheeses so the mechanism by which it emulsifies is less effective and therefore requires a higher percentage of sodium citrate. As such, it can have some downstream effects like how the article mentions the cheese was more muted. Not a huge problem but you can’t use it 1:1 at the same ratio as fresh cheeses and sometimes the required ratio leads to undesirable results
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