Limestone Water - this was new to me

We attended a Thai cooking class while in Bangkok last week and one of the surprising to me ingredients was limestone (or lime) water. It’s made by soaking lime putty in water and apparently makes pastry crispier and helps fruit keep its shape when cooked.

Here’s a sample recipe:

Has anyone here used the ingredient outside of traditional thai recipes? I could see trying it in a pie crust or fruit pie filling.

No but I’ve used other alkaline ingredients. Limestone is calcium carbonate and they made it in Thailand by burning sea shells and running water through the result. It would be an interesting thing to use.

You can make sodium carbonate by baking off most of the water in baking soda. It makes for a much stronger alkaline powder. If you use a bit when you make your homemade ramen noodles, you get the appropriate springy texture, very unlike Italian pasta. I believe that many, if not most Asian wheat noodles use some form of an alkaline agent, whether calcium or sodium-based. You can just throw it in the cooking water for any pasta, but then rinse the pasta or it will taste like soap. Do it with boiling water so you don’t cool down the pasta.

I’ve marinated shrimp in an alkaline water. It helps them become firmer when cooked. Or so I’m told. They didn’t seem all that different to me.

Interesting idea to use it in pastry. I haven’t done that but now I’m curious. The only problem is that a little of that stuff goes a long way.

What were you making with it when you used it?

That covers it!!!

That’s interesting; I just read an article the other day suggesting that if, in a pinch, you boil linguine with just a bit of baking soda the result is a passable ramen noodle. They also warned that a very little bit goes a long way.

We used it for a deep fried pastry which was indeed nice and crisp. How much if that was attributable to the water I don’t know.

I have a supply of the lime now waiting to experiment with.