Milk Frothers

My sister has been using one for years. A few years ago she bought me one for Christmas and I could never get it to work right. After visiting her this past Fall, I realized why mine didn't work. I always bought 2% milk, while she bought 1%. Apparently, the more fat in the milk, the less effective it is. I've now been using it with 1% milk for the past few weeks and enjoy it more than just adding milk to morning coffee. From what I understand, if you add sugar to skim milk you can froth it to the point where you could make a whipped topping for dessert, but I haven't tried that yet. Mine is similar to this: Aerolatte Milk Frother

I thought I'd update his post. Actually, the reason mine wasn't working properly was the batteries. I replaced the double A batteries and it is now spinning 3 times faster. I have now successfully used it on everything from skim milk to heavy cream - added sugar to the cream and made whipped cream in a small bowl for St. Patty's Day dessert in about 20 seconds. Clean up is simply to operate it under the faucet. I also used to to whip some sweetened frothed milk in some almost set Jello. I love this thing.

[Jenise]

I thought I'd update his post. Actually, the reason mine wasn't working properly was the batteries. I replaced the double A batteries and it is now spinning 3 times faster. I have now successfully used it on everything from skim milk to heavy cream - added sugar to the cream and made whipped cream in a small bowl for St. Patty's Day dessert in about 20 seconds. Clean up is simply to operate it under the faucet. I also used to to whip some sweetened frothed milk in some almost set Jello. I love this thing.

Aha! You know, I saw your earlier post and thought, "no, the more fat the better the 'crema' ". But if your results were different, I wasn't going to say anything. Glad you worked it out.

"no, the more fat the better the 'crema' ".

While true, what's interesting is that if I put 1/2 inch each of heavy cream and 1% milk in separate cups, the heavy cream will get very thick and double in volume, whereas, the 1% milk will continue to take on air and make a light, fluffy foam that will fill the cup. Perhaps we need a Mark Lipton explanation for this.

"no, the more fat the better the 'crema' ".

While true, what's interesting is that if I put 1/2 inch each of heavy cream and 1% milk in separate cups, the heavy cream will get very thick and double in volume, whereas, the 1% milk will continue to take on air and make a light, fluffy foam that will fill the cup. Perhaps we need a Mark Lipton explanation for this.

Dunno if he can, or if he'll just continue to speak of himself in the third person! The key to bubble production is the surface tension of the liquid. In general, the more viscous a liquid is, the higher the surface tension, so cream should make more bubbles. However, the weight of the bubbles will also limit how many can form, so that may be why the heavier cream doesn't foam up as much.

Sorry that I haven't any more insight than that, Howie!

Mark Lipton

This issue has bugged me ever since I worked in the college espresso house. I pushed for bringing in extra rich milk as I was sure it would foam up better for the cappucinos than regular milk. We made pretty crummy cappucinos.

Apparently, there are two separate things going on with milk foams and cream foams. Milk foams are primarily stabilized by proteins while whipped cream is stabilized by fat (or at least so sez Harold McGee). From what I gather, low fat and skim milk has extra protein added to it, so it foams up more easily than whole milk, which doesn't have enough fat to produce a fat-stabilized foam as does cream. The fat in milk may even get in the way of frothing in somewhat the same way that egg yolk can mess up a meringue (although I didn't get that from McGee). This difference also helps explain why whipped cream needs to be done cold while milk can be frothed with steam.