We’re Forever Blowing Bubbles!
It is a sunny Sunday afternoon in 1963. I am ten years old. Am I outside, playing? NO. I am sitting on a plastic covered sofa in my German Grandmother’s living room in Rockledge, PA watching Mr. Lawrence Welk and his bubble machine. My grandparents are deaf and shouting to each other (We took the train! We had ham For lunch!) so I don’t even know why it’s important that we have the TV on, but it is the way the visits go: Lawrence Welk, Gladiator Theater and then Roller Derby. My bare legs stick to the plastic, the rough edges of my Easter petticoat are biting into my skinny little girl waist, and my father - who insists on these visits - is snoring.
Why am I thinking about this, this morning? Well, because today it’s the 107th birthday of Mr. Lawrence Welk, The Bubble Master, King of Champagne Music and National Bubble Week is March 20th to March 26th. Before your interest bursts like a soapy bubble in sunlight because you can’t figure out why I would mention this at all in a food blog, consider the contribution of the humble bubble.
Flat soda, english muffins with no nooks and crannies, and rice krispies that don’t snap, crackle or pop -no bubbles! How would you know water was boiling? No whipped creme? Birthday parties with no cake and certainly no balloons. Anniversaries with out the chemistry of either your relationship or your favorite fermented beverage. To make anything special, palatable or even more understandable, we always blow a little air into it.
Bubbles that appear in food as part of the preparation process are the result of chemical reactions. Cakes that rise need a combination of raising agents like baking soda, baking powder and cream of tartar. When you combine them and add them to a flour and egg mixture, you get a batter capable of suspending the CO2 as bubbles. Heating expands the bubbles and the cake rises. If this combination is off in percentages, then you get a flat cake, either from the inability of the batter to support the bubbles and the cake will never rise, or the bubbles will get too big, burst and the cake will fall. Once you have that carefully beaten cake batter in the pan, you must smack it on the counter sharply to break up bubbles that are too big, or your cake will raise unevenly. The precision and care required to produce a good cake is, In my humble opinion, why people who bake well are math type of personalities while people like me who refuse to measure anything are better off sticking to crock pot stewing.
In bread prepared with yeast, the bubbles that form to make the dough raise are caused by the yeast organisms digesting the sugars in the dough and belching out carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide causes ‘bubbles’ or small spaces that stretch the dough and these spaces are supported by the flour and fats used in the recipe. Soft breads use a fat that is soft at room temperature, english muffins use a fat that is hard and that causes the shiny, stiff spaces that become the nooks and crannies.
Rice Krispies? That snap, crackle and pop that you hear is caused by thousands of little bubbles being dissolved when they hit the liquid milk which causes pressure. Where did the bubbles come from, in the first place? The rice is popped like pop corn (also essentially a structure of bubbles stuck together) at a very high temperature. Sometimes you can see little bubbles forming in the milk as the gas that formed the bubbles escapes. What is that gas? I could not find an answer to that.
A recent trend in very fancy restaurants is to add a foam to a dish. Similar to a traditional whipped cream, a gas of some sort is introduced into a liquid by whipping or ‘frothing’. This liquid can be sweet or savory, but if you don’t get it to the table quickly, it looks like snot on your plate. Not sure this is going to catch on, and it might just be an excuse to introduce big canisters of N2O or laughing gas into restaurant kitchens which tend to be time driven, very tense places.
Let’s not forget our own contribution to food related bubbles. The flatus and belching we experience after eating foods like beans or drinking too much soda or fermented beverages like beer are mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide and hydrogen that collect in our plumbing and then escape from our bodies by resonating against soft tissue relieving us and alarming others. In my own mostly male biological family, farting is considered a sport like horse racing, and quality explosions are given names like “Double Cheek Rhapsody” or “The Ecstasy” and brought up at meal time for years. Who can forget this famous scene in Blazing Saddles? As we say around here, a belch is just a fart turned upside down.
It would be a sad, sad world if there Beano gas or bubbles! So celebrate, blow some!
