Pasta sauce with parm not integrated
Hi y’all! Hoping you can help me with my problem or give me some tips, not sure where I’m going wrong!
I make a lot of cream-based pasta sauces that use Parmesan cheese as a thickening agent as opposed to flour. Every once in a while, it just completely flops. Rather than incorporating and thickening the sauce, it just clings to my whisk and absolutely refuses to be anything but a gooey glob stuck to it. Not only does it kill the sauce, but my god is it hard to clean melted cheese off a whisk. It’s happened with both new recipes and maybe 5% of the time with my tried-and-trues that I make constantly. Anyone know what the problem may be and how I can solve it?
Things I’ve tried and I don’t *think* are the problem, please correct me if I’m mistaken:
- temperature of the sauce when parm is incorporated
- melting and clumping before it gets a chance to dissolve (I add it very slowly, whisking constantly)
- proportion of fat in the sauce for the parm to cling to (may or may not be chemically relevant, lol, doesn’t hurt to try)
- material the whisk is made of, I have tried both metal and plastic
- shape of the parm, this has happened with both shredded and grated