[Sca-cooks] Re: Strawberries and Snow

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach Philippa Alderton:
>--- Stefan li Rous <stefan at texas.net> wrote:
>>  Aoife details her experiment with making "snow" and
>>  says near the end:
>>
>>  > 9: 30. I've beat the bejeebers out of this stuff
>>  and it isn't changing in
>>  > the least. I abandoned the stick and went back to
>>  the whisk, thinking an
>>  > air-volume and speed equation might be my problem.
>>  No such luck. What I have
>>  > in my hands is a bowl of satiny, but still
>>  semi-liquid frothy stuff that
>>  > resembles the texture of cooked icing in it's
>>  runny-but-frothy stage. It
>>  > hasn't changed by now, and I doubt it's going to.
>>
>>  When I tried this snow recipe last summer, this
>>  sounds exactly what
>>  happened to me. Mine looked very much like the
>>  description you give
>>  above. When I talked about this on the list, they
>>  pointed out several
>>  possible errors, including contamination with egg
>>  yolks. Now, I'm
>>  wondering if I was doing this right. Or at least
>>  according to the
>>  directions.
>>
>>  Maybe it's time to try this again. And it would be
>>  good on strawberries.
>>  And they do seem to be in season again...
>
>Just for the exercise, why don't you check the ambiant
>temperature and himidities in your areas. Atmospheric
>conditions can and do have an effect on how fluffy
>different air infused confections will get.
>
>Phlip

See, this is wot I wuz on about. If you beat them together (even if
the whites have been beaten previously, but the cream is not), the
fat in the cream will act pretty much as the same as the fat in the
egg yolks, and mess up the aeration of the whites, either by
preventing further aeration or destroying the aeration that is
already there.

Maybe, for this to be a scientific possibility, Aoife is right and
you have to beat them separately, at least the whites. The recipe is
a little unclear; its terms are a bit like the assumptions you may
and may not make arithmetically when an equation starts to have
things in parentheses. Do we follow the instructions in sequence to
the ingredients as listed in sequence, or do we apply _some_
instructions to specific ingredients _before_ adding them, and apply
the other instructions to the combined mass?

Aoife seemed to feel that the whites were previously beaten, then
mixed with, probably, a significantly heavier cream than we're used
to seeing, then the whole thing mixed with the flavoring ingredients.
 From the recipe, it seems like it could go either way.

But this is why I was hoping people would try following it exactly
and be willing to discuss what happened in detail.

Adamantius