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The Ribbon Stage—Shedding Light onto an Ill-Defined Culinary ‘Marker’ for Whole Egg Foams

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Abstract

The “ribbon stage” is an important culinary marker that is a critical intermediary step for many pastry recipes. The term refers to foams prepared from whole eggs and sugar which, after some time of whipping, have the distinguishing behavior of falling back into the bowl in the shape of a ribbon without readily blending into the rest of the batter. Ribbon stage foams are unusual because they are prepared with whole eggs. Whole egg foams have been studied to a limited extent, and the ribbon stage remains uncharacterized. Here we report on the physical and chemical properties of the ribbon stage, and explore how thermal and mechanical treatments affect them. We show that the ribbon stage is a metastable, non-Newtonian foam, which is frequency dependent and shear-thinning. It has an overrun of ~ 310%, an air phase fraction of 0.76, and about half of its bubbles are below 25 µm in diameter. Further, we show that thermal pre-treatment is essential to reach the ribbon stage. Both under-heating (< 45ºC) and under-whipping (< 7 min) produces unstable foams with a heterogenous bubble size distribution, indicating that partial protein unfolding could be important for stabilization and adsorption, and that sufficient shear is necessary to create surface area and smaller bubbles. We also show that over-heating and over-whipping, although leading to stable foams, have lower foamability and viscoelasticity. Our findings can support consistent reproduction of high-quality foams by chefs, amateur bakers, and manufacturers, as well as the development of sustainable egg substitutes with comparable properties.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Harvard Materials Research and Science and Engineering Center (supported by NSF award DMR 14-20570) at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences for the use of rheometers. We also thank Anqi Chen at John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University for helpful discussions on the analysis of microscopy experiments, Dr. Axel Bidon at University of Barcelona, Spain, for generously providing lab space for the pilot experiments, Dr. Juan Carlos Arboleya at University of Mondragon, Basque Culinary Center, for discussions about the rheological data, Pau Llorens at Autonomous University of Barcelona for assistance analyzing microscopy images, and finally Shimadzu Corporation for providing their EZ-SX Texture Analyzer to the Science and Cooking lab at Harvard with which the experiments in this study were performed.

Funding

National Science Foundation [grant number DMR 14–20570] (which supports Harvard Materials Research and Science and Engineering Center).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Patricia Jurado-Gonzalez & Pia M. Sörensen

  2. Barry Callebaut Americas, Chicago, IL, 60654, USA

    César Vega

  3. Barry Callebaut Gourmet, Carr. Nacional 152, Km 71, 3, 08503, Gurb (Barcelona), Spain

    Ramón Morató & Xavier Gonzalez

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  1. Patricia Jurado-Gonzalez
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  2. César Vega
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  3. Ramón Morató
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  4. Xavier Gonzalez
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  5. Pia M. Sörensen
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Correspondence to Pia M. Sörensen.

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Highlights

- Physico-chemical properties of a previously uncharacterized culinary marker

- Ribbon stage is a non-Newtonian, elastic (G'>G'' at 1Hz) and shear-thinning foam

- At ribbon stage, overrun is 310%, air fraction is 0.76, 40% of bubbles are <25µm

- Pre-heating the egg/sugar mixture is necessary for stable and elastic foams

- Too much shear/heat gives low elasticity/low overrun; too little gives unstable foams

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Jurado-Gonzalez, P., Vega, C., Morató, R. et al. The Ribbon Stage—Shedding Light onto an Ill-Defined Culinary ‘Marker’ for Whole Egg Foams. Food Biophysics 17, 397–408 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11483-022-09731-0

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