cooking with TCA

so, from the wine side, we know that TCA - corkiness in wines - is caused by the interaction of chlorine and wood products. tonight i started to soak my wood chips for smoking some pork when it hit me! my tap water has chlorine! so, i could be making TCA to smoke my pork with. so i used non tap water instead. i suppose one could soak wood chips in wine. anyone tried this?

[Jenise]

Haven't tried it nor am I worried about chlorine, but you give me an idea--next time we smoke salmon, wine it will be. Why not build in more flavor when you can?

IIRC TCA is destroyed by heat - i.e. a TCA affected wine reduced down may be stripped of flavour, but the smell of TCA would go. Thus I'd not be worried about the smoking process. The exception I recall to this was to avoid 'de-glazing' a pan with TCA affected wine, as the TCA can bond with the meat juices/fat in the fan.

All 2nd hand stuff, but it stuck in my memory when it came up on a different wine forum.

I've been researching caterers here in Sonoma County for a 4th of July party. A couple of them brag about using oak "soaked in wine". I guess they probably use discarded barrels, chopped up.

The caterer I chose doesn't do that, but she's less expensive too, as well as available. So I won't be able to report on the nuances of vinous barbecue.

John

regarding the 'minimal' level of chlorine in tap water. the amount of TCA needed to be noticable is in single digit parts per trillion, so...... minimal amounts of chlorine can still produce more than enough TCA to affect flavor.

and if the TCA can bind with the fat in a pan, why can't it bind with the fat on the meat? it is highly volatile.

David,
I think that it's generally agreed that wood + chlorine alone doesn't give rise to TCA. There needs to be microbial activity, too. For the geeky, it's for the methyl group of the anisole, which isn't found in the lignins in wood.

Mark Lipton

Mark said:

For the geeky, it's for the methyl group of the anisole, which isn't found in the lignins in wood.

Wannebe geeky... please expand. Guessing a microbial enzyme methylates an oxygen hanging off a benzene ring. Why, as part of what process, what are the starting materials?

I should know more about TCA. The one thing I'm almost certain about is that I'm blessed with a high TCA perception threshold.

Methylating a phenolic hydroxyl is a very mundane, easy reaction in biological systems. That's how epinephrine gets inactivated in the body.

The cofactor is usually SAMe, S-Adenosyl Methionine, and there are various methyl transferase enzymes that do the trick.

The other main cofactor for one carbon fragments is THF, Tetrahydrofolate.

To try and impress on my students how important "one carbon metabolism" is in biology, I tell them that the first step in bacterial protein synthesis is a test of both major one carbon systems. The first amino acid (codon AUG) is nearly always Methionine (without which you don't have SAMe). And in bacteria it must be formylated, in a process which uses THF. So a cell deficient either in Methionine or THF won't even be able to start doing protein synthesis which is fundamental to everything else that occurs in the cell. E. coli spends about 95% of its ATP budget on protein synthesis.

So the bottom line is that you need microbial action as well as a chlorine source to get TCA. I doubt you're soaking the wood chips long enough to get the microbes established.

-Paul W.

So the bottom line is that you need microbial action as well as a chlorine source to get TCA. I doubt you're soaking the wood chips long enough to get the microbes established.

Even more doubtful when you take into account the antimicrobial activity of chlorine. So the microbes and the chlorine are essentially incompatible and must be introduced at separate stages of the process. Lucky for us, corks offer just such a scenario since they are bleached and disinfected with a chlorine source, then sometimes sit for long times before their use, permitting their exposure to microbiota for the final conversion to TCA.

Mark Lipton