hello

ok i think i finally found fumaric acid.

the key word is i think, it was in the right store, next to the other preserving agents as it should be, and it was as a crystalized salt.

the problem is when something is translated from english and back to english something is lost, and when i translated the stuff when i got home the bag said crystal of lemon.



so here is the question, i have a sour crystal, it is either citric acid or fumaric acid and i need to find a way to determine which it is, preferably without going through a precipitation tek.

does anyone know of something i could do with the stuff normally used around here to test it?

i was considering doing a gradual ph shift but i dont have any way to check the ph other that litmus paper so i cant be precise

and second to this question can citric salt be used in place of fumaric salt and if it is what are the downsides of doing it?



thank you

Care to share which product you bought? Perhaps members can shed a direct light on whether it is fumaric acid or not without doing any tests.

do you mean for the fumaric which i know is sound or the crystal of lemon which im unsure of.

the later did not have any identifying marks, it was repackaged out of 25kg bags which had mandarin printed on the sides and the small repackages just had what i eventually translated as crystal, but the guy who hand wrote the new label on it i think was trying to describe taste and not what the item was.

what would you like to know?

titrate it.

citric acid has 3 pka

fumaric acid has 2 pka


---

you can use citric to make a DMT salt, it just won't crystallize as a solid dry crystal, more a goo. You could also use this method to figure it out.

In all seriousness, just provide us with the link describing the product you purchased.



The word "salt" is a red flag here, as neither fumaric nor citric acid should be a salt. They are acids.


"Crystal of lemon" does sound like it is citric acid..

It is very likely that you have two things going on here; you may have citric or fumaric acid, and on top of that you may have a salt of either acid (meaning it is not good to use if you want an acid). As said above, provide us with the links so we won't be guessing.

well lets turn this around

would citric acid or fumaric acid be more sour to taste? because when i tatse it the "crystal of lemon" is far more pronounce

the thing with that label and translation, it was hand writting by the people who owned the store, they based the wording upon taste i would assume, but i dont think they would put citric acid crystals next to food preservatives like crystal ammonia, but i really dont know.


and i used the wrong term before when i said salt, i was referring to the texture (they are in granules), sorry about that.

Ok, lets turn this around, lets do a more relative and unreliable method of determining what acid you might have.





according to this, fumaric is not as sour as citric, and tastes slightly fruity. But I don't see how this could be of any use to you unless you had both citric and fumaric acids to compare it with.

Who knows, you might even have citrate or fumarate salts.
^ in this case you might not want to be eating whatever powder came in the package with the chinese lettering.

The easiest and most reliable way to solve your problem is doing what infundibulum posted, and sharing a link to where you obtained the stuff.

--

If you want to be really cool, you should titrate it, plot equivalents vs pH, and post the titration curve on the forum. Now that may sound unreasonable, or even unfathomable, but it would be cool and maybe we would all learn something

i got some lab grade fumaric acid 99%, the crystal of lemon tastes drasticly more sour than the lab stuff, but that could be because of many things.

so yeah i do have both to compare one next to the other, when i started this thread i didnt, but i still want to figure out some way to compare them.

ill just presume that i have a giant bottle now of something i know for curtain is fumaric acid and count my blessings that i have something else that i can make gum drops with.

i dont have a link for the crsytal of lemon, i couldn't read the bag.

anyhow thank you guys for helping me with my meandering.

myspicesage.com

This is what I have used .....

http://www.myspicesage.c...~476~Fumaric%20Acid~4.75