On Food and Cooking

and make it less runny, and thus allow the bubbles to survive long enough to accumulate into a sizeable ...

because water and air are very different physical environments, the simple mixing of air into the whites creates ...

wringing them often through a sponge. — Sir Hugh Platt, Delightes for Ladies, 1605 Eggs in Snow Break th ...

little Gum Dragon [gum tragacanth] steept in Rose water to bring it to a perfect Paste, then mould it up ...

contribute much to the raw foam. But it is sensitive to heat, which causes it to unfold and coagulate. So w ...

joined to each other in a reinforcing network: bonds between positively and negatively charged parts of molecule ...

identifies as “a copper bowl for beating egg whites.” It turns out that along with a very few ...

Foamed egg whites. The folded proteins in egg white (left) produce a light, long-lived foam by unfolding at the ...

sulfur-sulfur (S-S) connection with each other. The addition of an acid boosts the number of free-floating ...

won’t absolutely prevent you from making a foam, but they’ll make you work harder and longer, and the foam wo ...

Egg white foams are almost always made with other ingredients, and these can influence the beating process and ...

sugar-egg mixture being harder to spread into thin bubble walls. Slow foaming is a real disadvantage w ...

the outset, in order to obtain a very firm, dense foam. A Silver Bullet for the Copper Theory Why do copper ...

glossy. I resumed my frothy investigations, and learned that both copper and silver do block sulfur reactions ...

the eggs. Old eggs at room temperature are often recommended on the grounds that the whites ...

the whites should be large enough to accommodate an eightfold expansion of their volume. It’s often recommende ...

Interpreting the Foam’s Appearance There are various ways to judge when the foam is at its optimum, from ...

Glossy Soft Peaks and Stiff Peaks At the “soft peak” stage, when glossy foam edges retain some ...

peak stage, the foam is even firmer, takes on a dull, dry appearance and crumbly consistency, and begins to l ...

complicated mixtures. Meringues: Sweet Foams on Their Own Though they’re sometimes folded into cake or cookie b ...