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Blending, mixing and whipping
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| Whether preparing a béchamel sauce for cannelloni and lasagne, or making fresh mayonnaise for a pasta salad, or any other kind of sauce, mixing and blending are two fundamentally important actions behind the success of many first courses. |
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At first sight you would think that mixing is such an obvious task that it needs no explanation: however, mixing together two or more ingredients to obtain a lump-free mixture is not that easy. Firstly, we need the right equipment: bowl, wooden spoon, metal spoon and ladle, as well as a whisk, which is indispensable for whipping egg white, cream or similar. As far as the bowl is concerned, it is advisable to buy a range of different sizes and materials: the most commonly used are in glass, which are also great for serving; they may be in tempered glass (duralex), heat-resistant and suitable for use in the microwave oven. Steel bowls are the best for preparing food, as they do not absorb smells, while rigid, shatterproof melamine bowls are very practical. If you are particularly fond of preparing fine puddings and cakes, a good purchase is a copper basin for meringues: the chemical reaction between this metal and the egg whites helps the whipping process, to produce a creamier, stiffer meringue.
When cooking it is very important to have a range of spoons available. Together with knives these are the most important tools used in the kitchen, and in some way act as a hand-substitute: they mix, whip, collect, scrape, serve and dose. Wooden spoons are the most versatile: they are strong, heat resistant and cannot be deformed, bent or split, and are therefore suited for blending particularly thick mixtures; finally, they can be left to stand in a bubbling pan on the hob without the handle getting hot: they are therefore ideal for mixing boiling pasta. Some chefs prefer spatulas to wooden spoons: their flat surface prevents lumps of unmixed food to stick in the hollow and makes for a more uniform mixture.
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Blending means mixing two or more ingredients to obtain a smooth mixture: to avoid lumps, you must remember to stir the mixture in one direction only. One particular type of blending is folding in: meaning adding other ingredients to an already whipped mixture and mixing delicately so as not to remove the air contained in the mixture. This operation is more successful if the two ingredients are of the same temperature.
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Whipping means stirring air into a mixture or ingredient using a whisk, in order to make the mixture swell and thicken: the classic example of this procedure is in the preparation of sweets, when whipping egg white or cream. The term, however, is also used in cooking to describe operations which bind, and lighten a sauce with fats (oil, butter or cream) or egg yolk; this procedure involves whipping the sauce energetically, just before serving as the sauce obtained using this procedure is not very stable.
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Sauces, gravy, soups can all be made thicker by adding thickening agents: in particular this procedure not only makes richer, more creamy sauces but also makes soups stay hot for longer. A cold sauce can be thickened by adding olive oil. To reduce a tomato sauce that is too liquid, pour a thin layer into a saucepan so that a large surface can evaporate, and make it boil over a strong flame, mixing frequently.
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Emulsifying is when two liquids of different densities are whipped together with a whisk or a blender. Vinaigrette, mayonnaise, cream, are three of the most common examples of emulsions, the dispersion of two liquids, one of which forms tiny drops, that cannot normally be mixed together but are blended thanks to the presence of an emulsifier. The emulsion obtained from the mixture of a watery substance and an oily one, such as for example with vinaigrette, is unstable: the two liquids will separate when you stop mixing; to make it stable an emulsifier is needed that is able to bind together the hydrophobic substances that would not normally bind because of their opposing composition. The most commonly used emulsifier in cooking is egg yolk, but mustard, pectin, soya lecithin and gelatine also have similar properties. It is possible for some emulsified sauces such as mayonnaise to "curdle", meaning that the ingredients it is made of separate. In egg- or milk-based creams this may happen because of overexposure to heat, which causes the egg to coagulate into small flakes; in mayonnaise, one of the most frequent causes is the excessive speed with which the oil is poured in. To recoup a curdled mayonnaise, the most common method is to start again with another egg yolk, using the previous mayonnaise mixture instead of more oil; another way is to add hot, then cold water drop by drop, mixing all the time.
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