Artisans at London-based design studio Bompass & Parr teamed up
with scientists at the Aerogelex laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, to
transfer the properties of the world’s lightest solid material into an
edible dessert.
Aerogel was invented in 1931, by American chemist Samuel Kistler as
part of a bet he made with fellow scientist Charles Learned over who
could replace the water in gels with air, without causing shrinkage.
With an air content of 95% – 99.8%, aerogel is recognized as the
lightest solid in the world, so it made sense for designers at Bompass
& Parr to try and emulate the making-of process of aerogel to create
the world’s lightest dessert.
Aerogels can be made using a variety of materials, but for this
special project Bompas & Parr focused on albuminoids, the globular
proteins found in egg whites. They set out to create a meringue, but
went about it in a “slightly” different manner than usual. They began by
making a hydrogel of egg white that was then cast in a mould before
being submerged in a bath of calcium chloride and water.
The liquid in the meringue gel was replaced with liquid carbon
dioxide, which can be be transformed into a gas in a process known as
super-critical drying. Finally, the gas is removed from the end product,
leaving behind only the skeleton of the original gel. In this
particular case, the final product is a meringue dessert that consists
of 96% air and weighs only one gram.
Dubbed the world’s lightest dessert, the meringue was presented at
the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (Ithra) in Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia during Ithra’s Creativity Season, Tanween, on October 10-26,
2019.
No word on what the ultra-light meringue tastes like, but considering
its main ingredient – air – it’s probably not the tastiest dessert ever
made. Still, having it evaporate in your mouth must be a pretty special
experience, if you can afford it.
