Product Manager
For a few years now, I’ve been trying to figure out the story behind a 1990s dinner party algorithm that has become a foundational coding block for modern business enterprise software. I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of the story, but I got a bit closer this week.
Comments closed
 |
| flickr/Alexis Fam Photography |
Did you know that you could make chocolate mousse just by using a block of chocolate and tap water (that you’ve preferably filtered)? I didn’t. Here’s why: every recipe I’ve seen for chocolate mousse and its derivatives, pots de crème, have called for ingredients that I didn’t want bastardizing the fine chocolate that resides in a special spot in my kitchen. Rarely eaten but carefully chosen, the chocolate I stash away at home is appropriate for only the most special occasions, like dinner parties.
 |
Having coined the term molecular gastronomy in the 1990s, it seems that This is quite involved with the vocabulary of these culinary times. He even makes a distinction between molecular gastronomy and molecular cuisine. He contends that molecular cuisine had sprung to life as soon as chefs and cooks departed from Paul Bocuse’s 1976 book, La cuisine du marché. La cuisine was the definitive schism between molecular cuisine and everything before it. Even la nouvelle cuisine is old-school. If you use any method or ingredient that Bocuse did not use in his kitchen, as documented in La cuisine, then you practice molecular cuisine.
The more commonly understood term, molecular gastronomy, refers only to the science of cooking, learning through observation and experimentation. In fact, This believes that molecular cuisine is slowly dying since everyone basically does it and, thus, no longer merits a special name, but molecular gastronomy lives on as a scientific discipline.
Now, what concerns chocolate in this discussion of semantics is the difference between emulsions and mousses. Sometimes chocolate mousses are referred to as emulsions, but in fact they aren’t. An emulsion, in the food world, is a mixture of fat and an aquaeous liquid that can be held together by an emulsifier. Most produced chocolates do contain emulsifiers, with lecithin being the most common. (I love how I got this piece of info from a part of the site whose URL discreetly contains the word nerdzone.)
The fat in a chocolate bar doesn’t dissolve in water or milk, but chocolate makers add lecithin into the chocolate preparation in order to hold that bar together: cocoa butter, milk, cocoa solids and all. Even fine chocolatiers add lecithin into their treats.
Basically, the chocolate that we eat is already an emulsion of fat and milk. When you start beating warm chocolate with a whisk, you introduce air into the chocolate, which will encapsulate the air as it slowly cools. When the chocolate entraps the air, that’s when you get a mousse. And, that’s the recipe.
Trawling the web, I found a weird patent for mousse with sterilized pieces of chocolate.
Another patent from 1983 described a product that could potentially be used to create “dessert mousse”. It patented a mix that called for: some type of sweetener, 10 to 80 percent weight of fat (any kind), 0.1 to 15 percent of a binder and 0.5 to 10 percent of an emulsifier. Ick.
Chocolate mousse has such a bad rep. They have required of us a bunch of heavy ingredients when made the traditional way at home. I’ve always known it as something that I would have found next to the Jell-O or yogurt at the grocery store, and there’s nothing special about that. (Well, shelf-stable tapioca kind of stands out to me.) The chocolate mousse gets lost in an army of mini containers. But I think chocolate mousse can make a comeback with This’s technique. It can shed its 1960s bulk and its 1980s portable portion sizing and find its way back into your kitchen in its purest form, mixed with a little water.