3

I am working on a multilayer chocolate mousse but is kind of hard for me as some recipe suggested me that I should use the white part of the egg and others suggest me to use double cream.

I would like to derive a scientific method to have nice and foamy mousse all the times, independently from when I use egg whites or cream.

  • Most of the times I use the "egg white" I manage to get a decently firm foamy mousse. Some people use salt to get it to become nice and foamy. Other people suggest is not needed. I noticed that when I whisk it and there are drops of water it doesn't foam.
  • When I use cream I don't manage to get it foamy. How can I do this?
    Any tips?

Any help suggestion is greatly appreciated.

Mien
  • 13,280
  • 37
  • 96
  • 139
mm24
  • 321
  • 1
  • 5
  • 11
  • There are several common methods to make mousse, and give it its foamy characteristic. 1) whipped cream; 2) egg whites; 3) italian meringue. Sometimes these are combined. Can you give a base recipe so that we can see what you are having trouble with to give you better advise? – SAJ14SAJ Mar 22 '13 at 01:17
  • Hi, and welcome to the site. We close questions here if they are duplicates of already-asked questions. We already have had something very similar to yours, http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/5482/how-can-i-make-my-chocolate-mousse-fluffier. Please look through its answers, and if there is some point not answered by them, edit your question to make it more clear how it is different from the old one. – rumtscho Mar 22 '13 at 01:22
  • The recipe I am trying to follow is this http://www.thegoodfoodguide.co.uk/news/hans-schweitzer-recipe .. is kind of a disaster.. especially because it uses a lot of dark chocolate in the mousse. I also do not have a termometer to measure the temperature of the mousse. The cream wouldn't get foamy so I used more gelatine in order to hope tomorrow morning to find the mousse foamy or at least thick.The problem is that I have a competition in 2 days and I never cooked a triple layer mousse like this before but I need to master it. I also would like to learn how to do a ganache layer to put on top – mm24 Mar 22 '13 at 01:41
  • @rumtscho btw.. thank u for the link.. useful one – mm24 Mar 22 '13 at 01:41
  • 2
    @mm24 this is a rather advanced recipe and not one I would do without a thermometer. Your chocolate will seize if overheated, your yolks will curdle if overheated but not fluff if too cold, and the cream will not whip if not chilled enough. We can give you advice, but if you are not accustomed to working with chocolate, you may want to choose another recipe for your competition - this one may take you 4-5 tries to learn. – rumtscho Mar 22 '13 at 01:46
  • Please **edit** your question with this new information... many people will ignore questions in which they have to read through a lot of comments to get all of the details. – Aaronut Mar 22 '13 at 02:00

1 Answers1

5

In the referenced mousse recipes (there is more than one in that dessert), the vast majority of the foaminess will come from the whipped cream.

You need to ensure that your cream is beaten properly to maximize foaminess, that is air volume:

  • Chill your working equipment, including the bowl, whisk, and of course the cream itself
  • If whipping by hand, use a large balloon whisk
  • Beat until holding the whipped cream up from the whisk does not cause it to lose its shape--this is the stiff peak stage. You need to be careful, as this is the last stage before overbeaten.

In the praline mousse, the purpose of heating the eggs and sugar is so that the gelatin will dissolve; the gelatin will provide the stability for the molded dessert after it is formed and chilled. The air beaten into the egg yolk mixture will help a little, but it is the more minor factor in the overall mousse.

In the panache based mousse, half of the cream is used to form the ganache, but again, the foam comes from the whipped cream. In this mousse the post beating stability will come from the cocoa butter firming up when the dessert is chilled.

SAJ14SAJ
  • 72,735
  • 13
  • 153
  • 231
  • Thanks. I used some "Agar Agar" (about 4grs for about 600 ml of liquid ingridients - counting as liquid the melted chocolate) and subsituted the egg with only cream as I needed to be sure that taste and shape where preserved also the day after and it worked perfectly. Thanks for ur directions, they helped a lot. – mm24 Mar 31 '13 at 01:45