Polyphasic colloidal foam
Posted on November 17, 2003 @ 16:13 in Espresso
I got a real espresso machine for my birthday a week or two ago. I've been learning a lot about grinding beans, pulling shots, and foaming milk meanwhile. I bet you didn't know that the crema on top of your espresso is a polyphasic colloidal foam.
Forcing water at nine bars of pressure through hard packed fresh ground coffee produces what the Italians call "crema". Impossible to define, it has been described as a polyphasic colloidal foam. Polyphasic means changing states, going through phases. With over a thousand aromatic compounds continuously breaking down and combining and a foam structure that is releasing its gas and aromas with each passing second, espresso is a perfect cuisine to have developed in the second half of the 20th Century. It is a superb example of chaos. You can guess at what it is by determining its chemistry relative to an exact time after brewing-but by the time you have picked up your pencil it is something else. Espresso is a culinary chimera.
Search Google for polyphasic colloidal foam.
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