Stiff peaks with sugar It can take a while for a meringue to reach stiff peaks and for the sugar to dissolve—about five minutes with a hand mixer. If the sugar has not dissolved for example, if it tastes gritty , keep beating. Beat the egg whites with cream of tartar. This binding substance helps the egg whites form into thick, glossy peaks.
The final stage is stiff peak, where the meringue will hold almost any shape. It will form sharp, distinct points in the bowl, and it is quite stiff and glossy.
It should feel smooth and silky, with no sugar grains. Make sure your have enough volume. Having a small amount of anything makes it more difficult to whip because you have to work that much harder to whip the air into a tiny amount of volume.
There are only two ways to mess up whipped cream: by mixing too little, or too much. Too little and it will be watery. That means, when you lift your mixing utensil out of the cream, you should be able to gently dollop it from your whisk. This warms the whites quickly, so there's limited risk of bacterial growth. Before you start whipping, check your egg whites for any traces of yolk.
The yolks are high in fat, and fat prevents the whites from foaming. If even a small amount of yolk gets into your whites as you separate the eggs, set them aside and use them for something else. Professionals usually separate one egg at a time into a small bowl, and inspect the white carefully before tipping it into the main mixing bowl.
Adopting this technique can save you a lot of time and eggs. It's important to have a perfectly clean bowl for whipping egg whites. If the bowl has any soap residue from washing, or if it has a film of fat from an earlier step in your recipe, your foam won't stiffen. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance.
Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. The Project: Whipping Egg Whites. Continue to 2 of 6 below. Continue to 3 of 6 below. Continue to 4 of 6 below. Soft Peaks. Continue to 5 of 6 below. Firm Peaks. Continue to 6 of 6 below.
In my tests, I stopped the machine from time to time stopping my timer as well to gauge the approximate stage of the whites during this process. For my first batch, I wanted to establish a baseline of beating times for clean whites, so I measured out grams of yolk-free egg white, which is roughly equal to the whites from three large eggs, and found that it took about four minutes to reach soft peaks and about five minutes to reach stiff peaks.
In my next batch, I added one drop of yolk to the same quantity of whites. Without a pipette or some other more precise tool for measuring very small quantities of liquid, I had to settle for freeform drops of yolk. I therefore don't have an exact measurement for how much yolk I added.
Still, extreme precision isn't necessarily so important here: Since no one adds yolk to their whites on purpose, and since there's no way beyond a visual assessment to measure yolk that's accidentally gotten into whites, knowing exact quantities doesn't really help in real-life situations. My main goal was to get a rough idea of whether whites can tolerate the presence of any yolk or not, and, if so, approximately how much. In any case, with that single drop of yolk, the whites still managed to form both soft and stiff peaks, but it took longer: about five minutes for soft peaks, and six minutes 45 seconds for stiff peaks.
I let both the batch of very stiff clean egg whites and the batch with one drop of yolk sit for at least one hour, and, aside from both of them weeping liquid—the result of being whipped to the point of being over-beaten—both batches retained their shape the entire time without deflating. It's possible that there was a subtle difference in the structure of the two foams due to the presence of the drop of yolk in one of them, but to the naked eye, it was invisible.
For my third batch, I added three drops of yolk to grams of white, a fairly significant amount, and here things broke down: The whites were unable to whip up to even the soft-peak stage, even after seven minutes and 30 seconds of beating time.
I ran the test one more time, doubling the amount of whites to grams about six large eggs' worth , and saw the same trend: The presence of a single drop of yolk slowed the formation of foam, with the clean whites hitting soft peaks at four minutes 30 seconds and the ones with one drop of yolk reaching soft peaks at five minutes. For a final test, I took a paper towel and soaked it with some vegetable oil, then rubbed a very thin sheen of that oil in the mixing bowl itself, to simulate a bowl that wasn't washed properly and still had traces of fat on it.
In this case, I saw no change in the whipping time compared to my batches in which everything was clean: The greased-bowl whites hit soft peaks at about four minutes 20 seconds and stiff peaks at about five minutes, compared to four minutes 30 seconds and five minutes, respectively, for the clean whites.
The advice to keep your whites clean and free of yolk or other fat is based on a truth: Fat can interfere with the beating of egg whites into a stable foam, and it does have the potential to completely ruin the batch. But it is not true that a trace or speck of fat is guaranteed to prevent whites from foaming up properly. Based on these tests, a speck of yolk in a batch of egg whites is no reason to send them down the drain, as they will likely whip up just fine, albeit a little more slowly than totally clean ones.
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