Tips for How to Make Great Mousse Recipes
Simple Techniques Guarantee No Mousse on the Loose
May 24, 2009
"Mousse" (moos) is the French word for "foam." The light airy texture usually comes from either beaten egg whites or whipped cream.
Learning to make a great mousse requires just a couple of important techniques that are easy to master and will go a long way to boost your culinary confidence. Once you’ve got them down, you’ll want to try:
For many mousse recipes, like the chocoholic’s chocolate mousse, a water bath technique is used to slowly melt the chocolate. Often this is accomplished with a double boiler, but a metal bowl over a saucepan of simmering water works just as well. The French term for this technique is bain marie [beyn-muh-ree]. The same technique, using the constant temperature of boiling water to control the heat, is used in many baked preparations as well.
The other technique is beating egg whites, in this case, to a soft-peak foam. For more basics on separating and beating egg whites, go to How to Separate Egg Whites to Make Meringue. Folding egg whites into other ingredients is described below.
Tips for Making Great Mousse Fool-Proof
- For egg-white based recipes, the egg whites need to be beaten into a froth (soft peaks), because it is the air bubbles trapped in the froth which provides mousse its distinctive light and airy taste. Care should be taken not to beat the egg whites to the point that they become stiff. Stiff egg whites will be difficult to mix evenly into the other ingredients.
- The egg whites need to be "folded" into the other ingredients rather than stirred. Stirring would burst to many of the precious air bubbles, resulting in a flat mousse. Folding in consists of sliding the instrument (plastic spatula or wooden spoon) along the bottom of the container and then lifting it up the side (keeping the spoon horizontal). This gentle motion is used to mix the ingredients without losing the air bubbles trapped in the beaten egg.
- After the folding in the egg whites, the mousse ladled into individual serving dishes and put into the fridge to cool for at least an hour prior to serving. Cover the dishes with wax paper or plastic wrap so that they don’t absorb any aromas from other items in your refrigerator.
- Some mousses are made with a binder, usually gelatin. Gelatin is a protein derived from slowly simmering beef or veal bones. For the home cook, gelatin is sold in powdered and sheet form. Either type must be soaked in a cool liquid first to soften and swell the gelatin, a process called “blooming.”
- For sweet mousses, the sugar needs to be well dissolved. Icing sugar (a.k.a. confectioners' or powdered sugar, or sucre glace in France) is best because it dissolves quickly.
- Mousses that contain raw egg should be eaten the same day as it is prepared.
Where do Mousses Come From? A Brief History
Mousse emerged on the culinary scene during the eighteenth century. Chefs to French royalty discovered the frothing power of eggs and proceeded to make foams out of everything: vegetables, meats, fish, you name it.
Why the foam fixation? One theory is that, at the peak of the Enlightenment, the emphasis was on people’s higher faculties. Mankind's baser, more bestial features were considered gauche.
Dining trends de-emphasized the primal, animal-like aspects of eating. Place settings with modern utensils — designed to make the process of inserting food into one's mouth a more refined act — were formalized about this time. But once in the mouth, must one actually chew the food like an animal?
Foams to the rescue. The food was puréed, then delivered in an elegant, eggy, cloud-like fluff. Starting in the mid-1700s, everybody who was anybody was taking their nourishment in foam form, though not yet sweets. Perhaps delayed by the French Revolution, it would be another hundred or so years until dessert mousses began to proliferate.
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