TransWikia.com

Can any liquid food be beaten into a mousse?

Seasoned Advice Asked on October 5, 2021

Hervé This discovered that one can make chocolate mousse with chocolate and water only.

This recipe is shown in this MasterChef video, and also detailed here.

Essentially, one melts chocolate with water, then whisks it over an ice bath to incorporate air bubbles, and after a while the mousse is formed.


Is this property unique to chocolate? Would this be possible, with, say, a strawberry purée?

2 Answers

Chocolate is a solid at room temperature, strawberry puree is not, so I strongly doubt that the strawberry would result in a foam.

The reason chocolate would form a solid foam is that it is largely composed of a two substances - sugar and fat. Together with the air these can form a solid of fats (similar to whipped cream) with microscopic sugar crystals helping keep it in place.

The only thing a strawberry puree would have that might reach similar consistency is the sugars. If you were to heat to a high enough heat that the sugars polymerize crystallise (like in candy), and whisk, you might get a structure like a mousse, but it would be crunchy.

Correct answer by bob1 on October 5, 2021

The beating of a liquid to a foam is not unique to a chocolate-and-water mixture. Neither is it something that works with any random liquid. What you need is an emulsion or a colloid which contains something that can hold the bubbles of the foam, and

  • has the right proportion of that "something" to the liquid part
  • has the right particle/droplet size
  • is being processed at the right temperature (or change of temperatures, for example a sponge cake is a foam that has to start at room temperature and then get heated to first expand and then set into a stabilized state).

Ferran Adria has created this very simplified diagram:

diagram

Translated from the "base" column, the diagram states that you need the proper amount of gelatin, fat, egg white or starch for a foam. The not-so simple version is that

  • binders other than gelatin will also work
  • protein suspensions other than egg whites will work (e.g. the notorious aquafaba)
  • when you have a liquid which has more than one of these, all bets are off. It might be helpful for making the foam (e.g. in chocolate, you have both starch and fat), or be detrimental (e.g. if you get fat in your egg whites), or show different behavior depending on ratios (you can make hot protein-based foams with milk, but if you remove its water to make cream, it is only suited for cold fat-based foams).

The way you foam your food also matters, some liquids will foam with beating, others will require a siphon. Also, some foams are stable for a long time, others have to be served immediately before they liquefy again.

All in all, foams are a very complex topic, and for any given liquid that comes across your way, it is unlikely that you can just pick it and make it into a mousse. If you want to create foams, use a recipe, these are tested to work.

Answered by rumtscho on October 5, 2021

Add your own answers!

Ask a Question

Get help from others!

© 2024 TransWikia.com. All rights reserved. Sites we Love: PCI Database, UKBizDB, Menu Kuliner, Sharing RPP