Cream Chargers – the cheapest prices with discount codes can always be found at one of these online stores. Check for special offers before you buy and watch out for hidden freight charges! Don’t forget a whipped cream dispenser without a nitrous oxide refill is entirely useless!
There was once a time when whipping cream involved a bowl, some cream, a whisk and a huge amount of effort. It took a great deal of stirring and sweating in order to get any sort of usable product. Next came the addition of the mechanical whisk – this made things a little bit easier but probably not enough to encourage anyone to whip great quantities of cream.
The addition of electricity helped things along a little bit – but left a great deal of cleaning up to do. After all who would want to spray cream all over their face just before a dinner party – or even worse in between courses whilst you guests are getting restless you might be furtively wiping sticky stuff from you chin because of an unfortunate accident in the kitchen.
The newest technology of all for the caterer is the Whipped Cream Dispenser. To put it simply it does all of the work for you. The addition of pressurised gas aerates and froths the cream. There is literally no effort required on your part to turn the liquid dairy into stiff, peaked luxuriant dessert.
But it doesn’t stop there the whipped cream dispenser not only whips but also dispenses the cream!!! I guess you could say the clue was in the title to that one. A simple squeeze of the trigger is all that it takes to discharge a controlled stream of the white stuff.
So how does it work?
In order to understand this you need tom know a little bit about the chemistry of cream. Cream is the fatty substance in milk – most of the fat (butter fat) in milk will naturally rise to the surface if given enough time – leaving low-fat, aqueous milk in the lower layer. The butter fat layer can simply be removed by skimming it from the surface of the milk. The amount of fat in the cream is defined by law (eg. double, single, whipping cream) and also defines it’s characteristics.
Ever wondered why you can whip cream but cannot whip milk – no matter how much energy you put into it – don’t be fooled by things such as the McDonalds thick shake which is thickened by the use of other agents. The reason cream whips is because of the high levels of fat in it. A cream needs at least 31% butterfat content in order to be whippable. What happens is that as the relatively large fatty molecules are agitated together they begin to coalesce into even bigger globules. The attractive force between these globules eanbles then to coalesce into a liquid crystal, colloidal form which has the elasticity and the flow dynamics of a liquid but also the ability of a solid to hold its shape.
These form chains, clumps and sheets that have the ability to contain pockets of air – fortuitously the air is also introduced by the physical action of the agitation as the products is prepared. The fat globules retain their stickiness after the agitation has been completed so the aerated cream holds its volume long after the preparation has finished – this is unfortunately not the case for cream prepared using a whipped cream dispenser.
How Cream Whippers Work
The key to how a gas powered cream whipper works is the gas (Nitrous Oxide) that is used in them. Most systems use a tiny canister containing 8gm on N2O gas. Which might not seem a lot but 8 grammes of gas will expand to approximately 2 litres when released from the pressurised cylinder and into the atmosphere. The whipped cream dispenser is the vessel where the cream and the nitrous gas can combine to actually whip the cream.
The gas is released into the pressure vessel (whipped cream dispenser) where is dissolved into the cream – this is much the same as the way a soda stream forces the carbon dioxide to dissolve into the water to make soda water. Whilst the liquid and gas are contained together under pressure then nothing really happens – the magic occurs when the two ingredients are released into the lower pressure environment as they are discharged. The gas expands to its full size – which creates bubbles in the cream, and as it expands then it also has an agitating effect upon the fat molecules encouraging them to coalesce in much the same way as traditional methods would.
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