• Question: What would you say is the bubbliest (if that is a word) food you have ever seen?

    Asked by dom1234 to Grant on 14 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by ellieandharry.
    • Photo: Grant Campbell

      Grant Campbell answered on 14 Mar 2013:


      As you say, is “bubbliest” a word, and if so, what does it mean? Does it mean the most bubbles, the biggest bubbles, or the greatest volume of bubbles? I wrote a paper on this back in 1999, and calculated the volume of bubbles in a wide range of foods, from which I concluded popcorn, rice cakes, rice crispies and meringues have the highest air contents (they are around 90-95% air, although by that stage the air is not really in the form of true bubbles any more). But in thinking about what food strikes me as “bubbliest”, the one that comes to my mind is a milkshake, as its bubbles are quite big and obvious, whereas the bubbles in whipped cream, for example, are much smaller, so you can’t see them and therefore don’t automatically think of whipped cream as bubbly. Watching cream as it’s whipped or egg whites as they are beaten is quite fun, as to start with you can see the bubbles forming, as they are quite large, but then later they become smaller, so you can’t see them, but you can see how they start to change the texture of the whipped cream or egg whites (where they also change the colour from transparent to white). Incidentally, whipped cream has about 40-60% air by volume, while eggs whites can be beaten up to 80-85% air, and in both cases the air is in proper bubbles. So my final answer would actually be beaten egg whites – they are the king of food bubbliness. (If that’s a word!)

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