Whipped Cream Difficulties

The NYT has a regular feature, “Recipe Redux”, where Times writers revisit a classic recipe from the pages of the NYT, and attempt to update it for contemporary tastes/styles/availability of ingredients.

This week’s recipe was for Chocolate-Rum Mousse; the original actually sounds pretty good, at least to my unsophisticated palate.

So how did the NYT‘s chefs (Alex Talbot and Aki Kamozawa, who run the Ideas In Food website) update this recipe?

Talbot and Kamozawa considered making a terrine lined with the chocolate mousse and layering it with popcorn and more mousse, so the popcorn would behave like the chocolate wafers in icebox cake, softening and melding with the mousse.

Should have gone with that idea; sounds good to me. But, no:

Talbot and Kamozawa substituted beets for chocolate in the original recipe

Beets? Beets?! Were these people not loved enough as children?

Okay, let’s be fair: how did it come out?

After blending it together, 1966-style, they had a mousse that they liked a lot but didn’t quite love.

So…

…they whipped out their handy ISI dispenser (handy for some; it’s that magical tool that drove the foam craze) and made the mousse into a cloud.

To the cloud! Sorry. Here’s what I think they’re referring to when they talk about an ISI dispenser.

I asked Talbot whether readers might be daunted by a recipe that calls for an ISI dispenser. “We’ve grown and matured,” Talbot said, “and realized any recipe you put out there, no one really follows it. All it is is a suggestion: you might want to do this.”

Yeah. The original recipe sounds simple, straightforward, and relatively easy to prepare with nothing more than a blender and a stove. The new one requires relatively specialized kitchen equipment and sounds like crap.

I have to ask: if you did a side-to-side, A-B comparison, would Mr. Latte approve?