I blogged about carbonated strawberries some while ago. Those were made using dry ice which unfortunately is not always easy to get hold of. Last week however I bought a iSi Gourmet Whipper - one of those Ferran Adria uses to make foams/espumas. I plan to experiment with that as well, but the first thing I decided to prepare was carbonated fruit. In fact this is a safe way (the only?) to make carbonated fruit at home using a pressurized container.

The instruction booklet which comes with the iSi Gourmet Whipper only mentions cream chargers (filled with N₂O, dinitrogen oxide), whereas soda chargers (filled with CO₂, carbon dioxide) are not mentioned (I guess the opposite is true for the iSi Siphons?). This is quite amazing actually! Luckily however the cream and soda chargers are exactly the same size and both hold 8 g of gas. So it should be possible to make carbonated fruit with any of the iSi whippers (cream, easy, gourmet, dessert, thermo) or siphons available.

Here’s how you proceed:

1. Fill you iSi whipper (or siphon) with fruit, preferably fruit which has a cut, wet surface to allow the carbon dioxide to dissolve in the water/juice.
2. Screw on top securly
3. Charge with one soda charger (two if you have the 1 L whipper)
4. Leave in fridge over night
5. Release pressure with valve (Important!)
6. Unscrew top and serve immediately!
7. Enjoy!

This is what carbonated grapes look like. As you see, I decided to cut the grapes in to halves.


Notice how they sizzle!

A quick recap of the chemistry: cold water dissolves more CO₂ than tempered water, that’s why we leave it in the fridge. Also, remember that it takes some time for the carbon dioxide to dissolve in water, therefore it’s better not to be in a hurry. A quick calculation of the pressures gives the following: Both gases have molecular weights of 44 g/mol, so 8 g of gas corresponds to 0.1818 moles or 4.1 L at 25 °C and 1 atm pressure. The volume of the chargers is 0.01 L which gives an initial pressure in the chargers of impressive 445 atm! With an approximate volume of 0.7 L this gives a pressure (in an empty whipper) of nearly 6 atm - the same as in a bottle of champagne. However once you add water, the equilibriums will change and the pressure in the head space will drop. Anyone who remembers how to calculate the head space pressure at equilibrium if the container is filled with 0.5 L of water and cooled to 4 °C?

I’ve done some googling and there is also some mention of making carbonated fruit with an iSi whipper over at Ideas in food.

(The word play in the title works better for those with a mother tongue where iSi would be pronounced just like “easy”!)

Although I recommend the use of a thermometer, sometimes it’s convenient to know how you can also manage without. If you mix water at two different (but known) temperatures, you can easily calculate the temperature after mixing. Just multiply the temperature of each part with the relative amount. For example, if you have 3 dL at 100 °C and 7 dL at 10 °C (which happens to be the approximate temperature of my tap water), this gives (3 dL x 100 °C + 7 dL x 10 °C) / 10 dL = 37 °C which is just perfect for dissolving fresh yeast when making bread.

You can also do it the other way around. Let’s say you have boiling water and you know that your tap water is approximately 10 °C. If you want water at approximately 37 °C, you can do as follows:

Start by writing what you have to the left (100 °C and 10 °C) and what you want in the middle (37 °C). Subtract: (100-37) = 63 and (37-10) = 27. And voilá - you need 27 parts water at 100 °C and 63 parts at 10 °C (and 27:63 simplifies to 3:7 which is what we found above). Now of course if you really wanted water at 37 °C, you would simply put your finger in to see if it’s at body temperature…

Are there any practical applications of this? Yes - a simple, but elegant way to prepare fish would be to drop a fish of known weight and temperature (fridge @ 4 °C or freezer @ -18 °C) into water that has been brought to boil. Cover pot and turn off heat. The amount of water would be calculated based on the desired temperature of the fish. We are assuming here that there is no heat loss to the surroundings, which of course isn’t quite true. How fast pot of water will cool depends on how much water you use and on the pot. This can be corrected for, and luckily someone has already done it. More on this in my post on how to cook fish in cooling water.

We can apply the temperature calculation from above to figure out roughly what the temperature will with this cooking method. 800 g of fish from the fridge (4 °C) and 2,4 L of boiling water gives a temperature of (0,8 x 4 °C + 2,4 x 100 °C) / 3,2 = 76 °C. The cooling curves for a pot with 2,5 L of water suggest a temperature loss of 15-20 °C in 30 min which would bring us down to 55-60 °C which - considering that no thermometer is used - is quite good.

I have previously written about how you can cook a perfect steak with a simple DIY sous vide technique. Of course low temperature cooking applies equally well to fish with the only difference that the temperature can be turned down even lower.

A slightly different approach for cooking fish was presented by Haqvin Gyllensköld in the Swedish book “Koka, steka, blanda” from 1977, which I became aware of through Östen Dahlgren’s book “Laga mat - hur man gör och varför”. In stead of keeping the fish at a constant temperature (which requires quite some attention unless you have a thermostated waterbath), in this method, as the hot water cools, the temperature of the fish increases until they’re at the same temperature.

This is how you do it:

1. Weigh the fish
2. Boil the triple amount of water
3. Add some salt to the water (15 g / L)
4. Put the fish in the water and remove the pot from the stove
5. Check the graph below for how long the fish should be left in the cooling water
6. Serve!

Need help on fish names in different languages? Yeah, me too!

Cookware made from cast iron has a reputation for keeping food warm for a long time. Is that really true? Best way to find out is by an experiment. I decided to compare a cast iron pot with one of stainless steel. These are the pots I used:

For the first experiment I filled them each with 2,5 L of water, put the lids on and brought both to the boil and let them boil for a minute so the pot itself would be warm throughout. Then both were placed on cork plates and left to cool. The temperature probe was carefully inserted under the lid in order to reduce the heat loss, and removed once the temperature had stabilized. For the second experiment 5 L of water were used. The measured temperatures are shown in the graph.

Contrary to what I had expected, the stainless steel pot keeps water warmer! After approximately 1,5 hours there is a 10 °C difference between the two. As expected, when using 5 L of water, it stays warm longer. Physical data for the two pots are given in the following table:

The heat capacity of the cast iron pot is more than double that of the stainless steel pot. But this is negligible compared to the heat capacity of water: 10.5 kJ/K (2,5 L) and 20,9 kJ/K (5,0 L). Also, there is only a small difference in their surface area which cannot explain the large difference in temperature loss observed.

This leaves me with two eplanations:

My guess is that the difference in emissivity is more important (but please correct me if I’m wrong). With an infrared thermometer, one should therefore be able to measure a difference between pots of cast iron and polished stainless steel (even though they’re at the same temperature!) due to the difference in emissivity. Any one who can do the experiment and report back?

Conclusion: There are many good reasons to use cast iron, but keeping food warm is not one of them!

By beating air into an egg white you can increase it’s volume by a factor of approximately 8. Hervé This has shown that water is the limiting component. By adding more water you can significantly increase the volume. Addition of sugar further stabilises the foam by increasing the viscosity of the water. A very simple dessert kan be made by whisking egg whites with sugar and berries of your choice. In Norway we refer to this as “Troll cream”. There’s more on this over at eriks-food-ucation.blogspot.com. An interesting question for you to ponder upon is in what order egg whites, berries and sugar should be mixed to maximize the volume!

But there is more to such a foam than trolls! For the following experiment, use one eggwhite and a berry syrup of your choice - I used a blueberry syrup (approximately 1,5 dL). Start by whisking the egg white. Add the syrup slowly over 5-10 min while constantly whisking. Observe how the volume increases dramatically. When I did the experiment I got roughly 2 L of foam (which corresponds to a 40-50 fold increase in volume). Make sure you use a clean bowl, preferably one of metal as fats and oil cling very well to plastic bowls.

Now comes the fun part: Put some of the egg white foam onto a plate and place it in a microwave oven to make the proteins set! Hervé This described this in a recent article and decided to name this dish “Vauquelin” after the french pharmacist and chemist Louis Nicolas Vauquelin. It does take some experimentation to find a proper combination of the power setting and the time needed for the Vauquelin to set. If you overdo it, the foam will just collapse. I used the 360W setting and 4 seconds for the Vaquelin in the picture below.

Cutting through the Vauquelin with a knife leaves a trace which does not refill.

Scooping out with a spoon also gives you an impression of the texture.

Instead of blueberry syrup you can try other liquids. Hervé This suggests orange juice or cranberry juice (both require addition of sugar). Liquours also work fine (although my experimentation suggests that the volume increases somewhat less), but remember to add sugar as this stabilises the foam and rounds of the taste.

In a recent survey 72% of chefs say they may want to experiment with molecular gastronomy in 2007. That’s an impressive number and considering the attention molecular gastronomy gets in media I bet many home cooks would want to experiment in the kitchen as well. Here’s a list of things to consider if you want to make a scientific approach towards cooking:

1. Use good and fresh raw materials of the best quality available.

2. Know what temperature you’re cooking at. A dip probe thermometer with a digital read out is a cheap way to bring science into your kitchen.

3. Get a basic understanding of heat transfer, heat capacity and heat conductance. “Heat” in this context des not imply high temperature since it also applies to the understanding of freezing/thawing.

4. Learn how to control the texture of food. Some key points: temperature induced changes (freezing, heating), emulsifiers, thickeners, gelling agents, moisture content, pressure/vacuum, osmosis.

5. Learn how to control taste and flavor. Some key points: flavor pairings, spice synergies/antagonies, influence of temperature (Maillard reaction, caramelization, temperature stability, volatility), taste enhancers, taste suppresants, solubility of flavour compounds in fat/water, extraction.

6. Remember that prolonged exposure to a flavor causes desenzitation, meaning that your brain thinks the food smells less even though it’s still present in the same amount. Therefore, let different flavours enhance each other. Similarly, variation in taste, texture, temperature and color can open up new dimensions in a dish. This is referred to as “increased sensing by contrast amplification”.

7. Be critial to recipes and question authority - they do not necessarily represent “the truth”. Nevertheless, you can certainly learn a lot from the experts.

8. Dare to experiment and try new ingredients and procedures. Do control experiments so you can compare results. When evaluating the outcome, be aware that your own opinions will be biased. Have a friend help you perform a blind test, or even better a triangle test to evaluate the outcome of your experiments.

9. Keep a written record of what you do! It would be a pity if you couldn’t recreate that perfect concoction you made last week, simply because you forgot how you did it.

10. Have fun!

Heat causes many changes in food, but few appreciate how important it is to know at what temperature they are cooking and at what temperature the desired change occurs.

These tips for molecular gastronomy relate to the technical and scientific aspects of food preparation and eating, and I plan to elaborate on each of the points in separate blog posts. However, according to Hervé This’ definition of molecular gastronomy, one should also investigate the social and artistic components of cooking. A good example of this is the “Five Aspects Meal Model” developed at Grythyttan in Sweden (Gustafsson, I.B. et al. Journal of Food Service, 2006, 84.). Although intended for a restaurant setting, the general idea can also be applied for home cooking.

The meal takes place in a room (room), where the consumer meets waiters and other consumers (meeting), and where dishes and drinks (products) are served. Backstage there are several rules, laws and economic and management resources (management control system) that are needed to make the meal possible and make the experience an entirety as a meal (entirety – expressing an atmosphere).

Or to put it differently: average food eaten together with good friends while you’re sitting on a terrace with the sun setting in the ocean will taste superior to excellent food served on plastic plates and eaten alone in a room with mess all over the place.

One last thing: once you’re finished in the kitchen with your culinary alchemy, your gastro physics, your cutting edge science cuisine, your molecular cooking, your hypermodern emotional cooking, your science food or whatever fancy name you attach to it - remember the social and artistic components when you serve the food. Just so people won’t refer to you as a techno chef, a mad scientist or a modern day Willy Wonka. After all, molecular gastronomy is about the science of deliciousness, not technical wizardry.

Questions and topics for future blog posts are welcome at webmaster [a] khymos.org (substitute @ for [a]) or as a comment below.

One important aspect of molecular gastronomy is the application of scientific principles to food preparation in a normal kitchen. This can very well be illustrated by discussing the preparation of a steak. The surface of the meat needs to be heated to > 120 °C (250 F) for the Maillard reaction to take place at a reasonable rate. This gives meat much of it’s characteristic aroma. The interior of the meat however should not be heated to more than 50-65 °C (120-150 F) for a rare or a medium rare appearance. If the heat is provided by a frying pan with a temperature typically in the range 120-160 °C (250-320 F), the different temperature required for the interior and the surface of the meat can actually be quite difficult to achieve. Bringing the meat to room temperature before cooking by taking it out of the fridge 1-2 hours in advance helps. Also, half way through the cooking it’s advisable to let the meat rest on a plate to allow the heat to diffuse into the interior and to let the surface cool down a little.

There is however an easier way to make a perfect steak! In restaurants the method has been around since the 70’s and is known under the name sous vide (fr. under vacuum, more info on history of sous vide in this NY Times article). The meat is packed in plastic bags, vacuumed and put into thermostated water baths. This equipment is not (yet?) found in the average kitchen. So here is a simple DIY procedure. You just use a normal plastic bag, leave the meat in the water bath for 30 min (or longer) and then quickly fry both sides to generate the products of the Maillard reaction. You do need a thermometer though to control the temperature of the water bath, preferably one with a dip in probe.

1. Put the meat (I used a rib eye steak for this experiment) in a thick plastic bag. Only put one or two pieces of meat in each plastic bag - this ensures a greater contact surface with the water.

2. Add any spices you like (salt and pepper always works well - for the experiment shown I used curry paste, soy sauce and chili sauce in stead), press (or suck) out the air and close the plastic bag tightly by tying a knot (or use a zip-lock bag). You don’t want any water to enter the bag!

3. Heat a pot of water to the desired temperature (or use hot tap water) and place the plastic bag with meat in the water. Cover with a lid (not shown in the picture) to reduce heat loss. If you use a large pot of water it’s easier to keep the temperature constant. Also, it’s easier to control the temperature with an induction or gas stove top than with an electric plate since there is no additional heating once you turn them off. Regarding the temperature, start with 60 °C (140 F) and experiment from there (or check this table at Wikipedia for doneness temperatures of meat). You should leave the meat in the water for at least 30 minutes - more for a thicker cut. But the good thing is you can leave it for much longer (several hours) provided the temperature does not come above 60 °C (or whatever temperature you decided on). A convenient way to keep the temperature constant for a long time is to put the pan with water into the oven and use the thermostat of the oven.

4. Heat a frying pan, add a fat of you choice, remove meat from plastic bag and brown both sides of the meat. Since you take the meat directly from the water bath it’s already at about 60 °C. Therefore the browning is very fast.

5. A temperature of 60 °C (140 F) gives the meat a pink interior. It’s succulent and juicy. The short frying gives it a nice browned crust and the chewing resistance is perfect. All in all a wonderful combination of taste, aroma, texture and mouth feel!

Update: Click for more practical tips on molecular gastronomy