Puffy. Airy. Spongy. Voluminous. Delicate. These words describe how foods look, taste, and feel after cooks capture molecules of air within them. Ironically, air is never listed as an ingredient, but a dish may have more air in it than anything else.
Ancient kitchen alchemists irrevocably altered the course of culinary history when they discovered how to aerate food. No longer were breads flat, creams unwhipped, liquids uncarbonated, or meals minus the glories of soufflés, timbales, meringues, mousses, and genoises--or a host of other airy epicurean delights.
What they discovered was this: Air may be incorporated into food by chemical or physical means. Quite simply, certain foods rise and expand when heat and/or moisture combine with yeast, egg whites, whole eggs, baking powder, or baking soda. Likewise, a cook can increase food volume by whipping air into eggs, egg whites, or heavy cream with whisks or other gadgets, then folding the lightened, billowy mixture into denser ingredients. Or, as another alternative, a cook can bat air into doughs or batters. The result? Food that's light as air.
In the pursuit of lighter foods, frustrated cooks have resorted to many strange techniques over the years. Before the invention of baking powder, in the mid-1800s, for example, cooks had to find some other way to lighten doughs. Visitors to the Sully Plantation kitchen in Chanilly, Virginia, can find a beating block--a thick, waist-high tree stump, once considered standard kitchen equipment. On the stump's surface, cooks would briskly beat biscuit dough, pounding air into it with a stick. Apparently, everyday biscuits received two hundred whacks;
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