Fuming Over Food Foam
April 25, 2016
Have you tried foam yet? The kind you eat. It’s been around for a few years as a chic culinary food trend and honestly, I am not biting into it. To me, foam is a mass of agitated small bubbles like the ones you take a bath in or had fun blowing from a jar as a kid
Lucky for us, the world of fine dining has created a new taste, food foams as a dramatic finishing touch to everything from appetizers to dessert.
How exactly do you make food foam? First you will need a gadget called a Nitrous Oxide dispenser and NO2 chargers. You can find them on the internet or in gourmet cook stores. No cook should be without one, I guess.
Next you will need some sort of liquid, either juice or stock, depending on whether the foam is for a savory dish or a sweet ending. You will need to dissolve gelatin in a little warm water and allow it to sit for about 5 minutes. The gelatin is added to the juice or stock and allowed to set in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.
All of this is then transferred to the dispenser and the chargers are added. You will need two of them and you will need to shake the dispenser vigorously between each charger. The result is a sublime, whipped molecular wonder called foam.
I have been served foam on fish and desserts and there is no way to dig into it. I think of it as a delicate, tasteless netting on top of my food.
Why bother with this kind of drama that can leave you foaming at the mouth when the bill arrives.