Whipped Cream

General and production

Whipped cream is a relatively stable frothy and soft mass obtained by mechanical stirring of liquid cream.

The whipped cream must have some very specific chemical-physical "requirements": lipid content between 30 and 40%, integrity of the fat micelles, relatively low sanitizing temperature (pasteurization), low but not too low storage temperature , close to 0 ° C (more or less "refrigerated"), NEVER acid pH and absence of industrial processes such as homogenization and UHT; the "mechanical agitation" and "nature" (as they say) will do the rest. In fact, examining the composition of cow's milk, one realizes how the fat is incorporated into micelles, which are large lipid drops wrapped in a thin film protein which keeps them in aqueous dispersion, preventing them from aggregating into large lipid complexes. During the whipping of the cream, the same fat globules incorporate a certain amount of air which is retained by their external protein membrane. Initially, the incorporation of air results irregular and coarse: the external proteins favor the incorporation of air in the form of droplets and a film is created on the border between the air and the serum; with the continuation of the flapping the air bubbles shrink and resize, increasing in number; the film changes, accumulating more and more fat globules which, creating bridges between themselves and the air, give consistency and stability to the whipped cream. Ultimately, a system is created where the gaseous phase is predominant.
To obtain a good whipped cream, the manual skills of the operator and / or the calibration of the instrument are also fundamental (depending on the type of processing).