Bubbles!

The Serious Eats Team

December 4, 2022 at 12:17 PM·3 min read

The Negative Space of Food

Lightness. Levity. A little frivolity. These are the words we thought of when the idea of bubbles first came up in a brainstorming session for this digital issue many months ago. It felt right, especially as a follow-up to the moody visual tone of our first digital issue dedicated to the wok.

Ha. What fools we were!

Bubbles may not weigh much, but there's nothing lightweight about them. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that scientists have a better understanding of how to land robots on Mars than they do of the physics of bubbles in our food. But we pushed ahead anyway to create this tribute to—if we may borrow an art-world term—food's negative space.

<p>Serious Eats / Michelle Kondrich</p> — Serious Eats / Michelle Kondrich

Can You Stop Beans From Making You Fart? We Put 17 Methods to the Test

We partnered with Harvard's Science of Cooking program to find which common flatulence-reducing tips work and which don't.

Breads and cakes wouldn't exist without the bubbles that aerate them. Here's the scientific story of how they form, develop, and set in an oven's heat. This story is as old as the stalest bread, which is to say at least 14,000 years. The act of mixing flour with water, raising it with a leavener, and baking it goes back at least that far. The process is deeply familiar, yet most of us don't know much about what is happening down in that mass of dough. Let me tell you, it's complicated.

The importance of bubbles, though, isn't just about the bubbles themselves, it's about what they make possible. Only through an elaborate dance of a multitude of chemical and physical processes can a loaf of bread or moist cake exist. Understanding this science will not automatically make you a better baker (though it certainly can!), but it will help you understand why so many baking recipes work the way they do.

The Science Behind Vegan Meringues

Aquafaba, or the liquid that’s in a can of beans, is one of the most exciting cooking “discoveries” in recent memory. Not only was it found to be a superior vegan substitute for eggs than what had been commercially available; it was found by curious home cooks across the globe, experimenting in their kitchens to find something that could approximate the way egg whites behave in delicate desserts like meringues.

Get Recipe: Cheese Foam Tea

Get Recipe: Vegan Cardamom Meringue Cookies With Strawberry Compote

Get Recipe: Mixed Berry Trifle

Get Recipe: The Best Methods for Making Whipped Cream, Explained

Bloom Phase: How to Read the Bubbles In Your Coffee

Your coffee is talking to you.

No, not literally. Even though it might feel like the only thing pulling you out of bed every morning is the call of your morning brew, your coffee is actually communicating with you in a much more subtle way. As you pour water over your ground coffee, waiting patiently for that first sip of your pour-over that promises to bring you back to life, take a peek at what’s happening in the brew bed. What you will see is a language expressed in bubbles.