Back to Alice Medrich’s “Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts”.
Oh Alice, I’m not happy with you right now. I’m not happy with me, sure, but I’m not happy with you. Your bittersweet chocolate truffle mousse recipe is sublime – manageable and delicious. but your white chocolate mousse recipe which is also used for the milk chocolate mocha mousse I tried make yesterday) is not very good at all. It follows the same general guide to mousse-making (add soaked gelatin to chocolate mixture and let thicken, make safe meringue and then fold together) but the chocolate mixture doesn’t have any egg yolks, which would help thicken it, and the meringue just didn’t work the same way using a skillet as it did when I used a pot of water.
Take 1: the eggs I was using (brought to room temperature so they would cooperate), wouldn’t separate, and I got yolk in my cream of tartar and water mixture.
Take 2: The water couldn’t go up the sides of the bowl inside the skillet, and the recipe didn’t say how hot the water should be, so even with incessant scraping and stirring to keep the egg whites from cooking, they cooked. Scrambled egg white mousse is not delicious.
Take 3: I lowered the heat of the water in the skillet and got assistance to hold the candy thermometre in place. The trick is that when you place a bowl of egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar and water in a skillet of hot water, you need to stir quickly so the eggs don’t solidify, but you don’t want to over-stir and minimize the rising potential of the whites, which you’ll need once you remove them from the heat. The whole purpose of this ridiculous method is to make sure the whites reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent the possibility of salmonella poisoning, which is rare enough, but does happen. Does the end of not possibly getting sick from salmonella outweigh the pain of fussing with a thermometre while you try so hard to not cook eggs? Depends how much mousse you make in your life time, and how lucky you feel. I initially tried my tested method of stirring with the thermometre while waiting to see if the eggs were hot enough. Nope, they started scrambling. Quickly help came in the form of a friend holding the thermometre for me while I stirred. It was safe! Unfortunately I think the eggs can scramble at a lower temperature if you’re not stirring, so just because they’re starting to cook doesn’t mean they’ve reached the right temperature. Quickly off the heat, I stuck the egg beaters in the bowl and beat at highest speed until stiff peaks formed. Well, see, that was tough to tell, because the eggs didn’t rise. Like my naan, they had nothing left in them to give. I beat until it seemed like they may have been stiff and then let a mousse novitiate fold the chocolate mixture and whites together. It was a bit soupy.
So I decided to call it pudding. It was not light and fluffy. Like the naan, it was a bit dense. “Stunned as me arse”, we’d say in Newfoundland. Once it refrigerated a bit, it did solidify a little, but there was certainly no more air getting into it. It was not a fluffy pillow on my tongue.
Well, mousse, I’ll try again tomorrow. Christmas still needs three more meringues out of me. That’s a lot of second chances. Lemon mousse cake, frozen chocolate mousse cookie filling and mocha buche de noel await.
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