The setup. The four small colored bowls on the right contain the same gelatin mixture.

Raspberry and grapefruit mousse in the front, peanut butter mousse in the back.

The completed mousses.

The cheese mousse, plus a cracker.

Part of what interests me about cooking is its chemistry. Many foods - especially baked goods and confections, it seems - rely on complex and specific chemical reactions for even their most basic properties.

Take whipped cream, for example. Whipping something doesn’t always make it airy; you can whip water or chicken stock and it won’t become a foam. But there is something about the chemical structure of cream, and eggs, that allows them to retain air bubbles for a period of time.

One of the first “serious” dishes I ever made was a chocolate mousse, which is an interesting way of turning chocolate into a foam. This particular recipe uses unflavored gelatin and whipped cream, but my understanding is that traditionally you would use whipped egg whites and yolks.

I started thinking, what else could I make into a mousse? So I decided to try some experiments. The first step in each was coming up with a liquid with the same approximate consistency as melted chocolate. In retrospect this may not have been necessary. Once that was done, I subsituted each liquid into the chocolate mousse recipe I linked above, adding a little or less gelatin as seemed to be necessary.

I made four mousses.

• Raspberry. This was probably the best of the four. I used a sauce of raspberries and sugar. Next time I do this, I will probably filter out the raspberry pieces that were left in the sauce, though I don’t think this caused a particular problem. This went very well with the polenta cake I made at the same time, about which more in the next entry or so.

• Grapefruit. Again, I made a sauce of grapefruit juice and sugar, and some grapefruit pieces. I thought the grapefruit might cause the whipped cream to curdle, but it didn’t. This was a little strange, but not terrible; if you can imagine grapefruit pieces and cream, that is what it tasted like. I wonder if a peach or strawberry mousse might work well.

• Peanut butter. I was able to simply melt the peanut butter to achieve the consistency I wanted. This actually came out pretty well, and was delicious on Ritz crackers.

• Cheese. Yes, cheese mousse. I used melted whipped cream cheese for the base. This basically became a spreadable cheese, but was by no means bad. It would be a great way to build a custom cheese spread, incorporating herbs and other flavors into something that can be put on crackers easily.

Overall, the experiment was really interesting and gave me a new side to make for various desserts and perhaps other dishes. I think the next 3 mousses to try are strawberry, peach, and kiwi. They’ll go really well with a cheesecake or other savory cake. It would be interesting to try some of these with the traditional mousse recipe as well; I’m not sure if they would work.