I did exactly what should be never be done when making mousse…
…I multi-tasked. I was rushed and nervous and my egg whites started boiling, and I made a drastic substitution, but my goodness, it worked. The pillows of fluff that I tasted yesterday were enough to convince me that chocolate is not always the best kind of mousse, or cake, or guilty pleasure. I know it’s blasphemous, but dear lord it was a mound of lemon-flavoured heaven. The meringue melted on the tongue, and it was so light because there was no dense chocolate to weigh it, or me, down.
Oh, Alice Medrich, you should write another cookbook. It will be my other favourite. It will be exactly like your other “Chocolate and the Art of Low-fat Desserts” from which I took my birthday toasted hazelnut and dark chocolate mousse cake, but this one will be all lemon recipes. In the introduction to the recipe Medrich even says, “Every dessert chef needs a lemon mousse recipe”. This is it. I didn’t even think I liked lemon that much. I usually skip over the lemon recipes looking for the next decadent chocolate one, but you have shown me to be naive, Alice. So many wasted years thinking mousse could only succeed in chocolate form.
Yes, I’m done waxing poetic about lemons. Ridiculous, I know.
I did almost everything right:
gelatin
lemon zest
lemon juice
sugar
eggs, separated
vanilla
cream of tartar
heavy cream
When I see ‘heavy cream’ in a recipe, I turn the page. So I had turned this page a lot. Heavy cream needs to be whipped and needs to expand. Almond Breeze, my milk substitute, does not expand. Basically I replaced heavy cream with milk. I thought my mousse would collapse. If I actually managed to get the egg whites to the elusive ‘stiff peaks’ stage it would all be for naught. Well, sometimes you just shrug and push your luck.
The recipe: You sprinkle the gelatin over cold water and set it aside until you’re ready for it. Then combine the zest, juice and sugar in a saucepan. I really need a juicer, because it’s a little cold these days and my hands are a little dry. Lemon juice all over dry hands is painful and only a little short of self-flagellation.
Here was my problem with the recipe: It said to heat this mixture on medium heat and bring to a simmer. In the meantime you beat an egg and egg white until light in a bowl and then pour some of the hot lemon mixture into the egg. Well my lemon mixture didn’t simmer and then it boiled so I was extremely careful pouring it into the egg. I was not about to mess this up so early in the game by letting my eggs cook. Then pouring the egg mixture back into the pan, I checked the recipe to see that I was supposed to stir it until it barely started to simmer around the edges. Well it got to about a rolling boil in 5 seconds because I had waited so long for it to simmer in the first place.
This was Alice’s fault, but the next part was my fault. I have a very small strainer and you’re supposed to strain this mixture (which had thickened up probably too much) into a bowl to remove the lemon zest. This process took about 5 minutes because it had to be done in stages of pouring, straining, pouring, straining. In that time I was praying that the eggs didn’t get stuck to the pan I ended up with lemon frittata. Miracle of miracles…
Then you add the vanilla and gelatin to the bowl, which is placed in a larger bowl of ice water. I was also worried that I had taken too long straining and adding the gelatin and vanilla now would be too late. I did it anyway. Perfection be damned.
Then meringue. See first blog-post ever re: chocolate mousse to summarize my fear of meringue. I don’t own a stainless steel bowl. I own very nice and, I hoped, heat-proof, bowls but when you’re dealing with temperamental (hah!) candy thermometres, 90 seconds, and the difference between salmonella and a happy stomach, it’s a little risky to throw caution to the wind. So I threw it in the right direction, but threw it none the less. I whisked the egg whites, cream of tartar, and sugar with one of the beaters from my hand beaters (I need a whisk too I think) and held my breath while I put the beater down to get the thermometre into a cup of hot water by the stove (poor planning in advance on my part). The whites were okay. I don’t trust my thermometre. It has wrecked or jeopardized my food in the past, so I stirred with it to help it along a little, carefully avoiding the bottom of the pan that would trick it into thinking it was hot enough. It got…well, close enough to 160 degrees. The book said a minute and a half and then check it. I hate removing the bowl from the water though because if it’s not ready then it has all this time to cool down before you put it back in and start counting again. It seems like it’ll never get to a safe temperature that way and your egg whites are losing their potential fluffiness…So again, wind/caution, and I removed the bowl without spilling the egg whites into the water in the pot (Oh, I used a big pot instead of a skillet to get more water boiling and heat the eggs faster through the thicker bowl) and beat to what I figured might pass for stiff peaks. Really it was all I could do because the bowl was just about too small for the quickly-rising egg whites. I always under-estimate the size of bowl I’ll need for expanding egg whites, but once you’re beating you can’t stop and change bowls, you need to keep to keep going. So again, prayer helped and only a little egg white flew from the bowl onto various appliances. WAY better than my pumpkin pie disaster.
At this point I realized I hadn’t added the milk to the lemon/gelatin mixture like I’d planned. So I hoped it wouldn’t make it too runny to add it now, but what choice did I have? Leave it out? Leave milk out of a mousse? Hmm…even I don’t have the courage for that yet.
Folding. After all this hard work, how much air would be lost from my meringue? How many clumps of egg whites would remain because I was scared of mixing? This is another reason lemon is better than chocolate. Mocha-coloured chocolate really stands out from white meringue, but lemon is much more forgiving. I tried a new folding technique – scooping under and letting the mixture fall off the spatula toward the back of the bowl, before rotating the spatula back toward me to make another incision. This made a whole lot more sense in terms of ‘folding’ the mixture over, as it created a nicer hill than when I rotated the whole mixture over and it kind of plopped down on top of itself. Basically I shoved the meringue off the spatula while it was still horizontal and instead of turning the spatula over to follow the falling meringue, I rotated it toward my body. It seemed to work anyway. The nice thing about no whipped cream was that there was one less folding step. It’s hard enough beating part of the lemon mixture into the egg whites and then everything back into the lemon mixture.
Finally, it was done. Nothing collapsed. Nothing got salmonella. And the taste?
Oh it was so good. Organic lemons. Amalfi, the home of limoncello and the ridiculous rules for the selection of lemons for their alcohol of choice, would be proud.
So I beg you all. Try a lemon mousse next time.
I think that’s enough religious imagery for one day.
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