Whip It Good

Now that we have the required Devo reference out of the way. We fully expected this edition of the newsletter to be the simple one, yes? Eric and I both jockeyed to get to write it thinking… whisks, folding, what could possibly go wrong, right? Wrong? How about all of it. Let us disabuse you of a simple notion: There’s a whole lot more to whisking something up than a simple ‘Whisk goes in the bowl, whisk goes roundy-roundy.’ A lot more. There’s tools, and techniques, there’s ingredients and temperature control oh my.

Having said all of that… we are going to be focusing exclusively on non-mechanical means of whipping things. First, because this is one of several tests of true cooks: can you whip egg whites into a thick, brilliantly white snowy mixture? By hand? The second reason is that we have a hard time not giggling like schoolboys when someone mentions using a machine to whip something. Yes, we admit to being juveniles, we’re comfortable with ourselves.

Well, we’ve learned how to break things down so the obvious next step is to learn how to put them back together. Or together into a different (hopefully better!) order. With that in mind this section is referred to as “The Spoon” because of that tool’s obvious connection with mixing things up. We’re talking about combining two, three or more items into something that is new. And yes, even when you whip egg whites you are mixing the proteins with air. So what are the various methods of assembly that we will be reviewing in this newsletter?

1. Mixing
2. Kneading
3. Whipping
4. Folding

Pretty easy stuff, you might be thinking. Simply toss the target ingredients into the old stand mixer, hit ‘10’ and go see if the commercial is over on the TV, right? Well… no. In fact that’s a pretty easy way to run into issues. Lots of them. But not to worry, we’ll be covering all of the finer points of methodology involved in each of these. Understand that in our minds mixing and kneading are variations on a theme as are whipping and folding. Two pairs as it were. Read to dive in? Here we go…