What can you do with a whipped cream canister? More like: What can't you do? We all know that these gleaming coffee-shop contraptions create ethereal whipped creams and look pretty sexy doing it. But as any modern-day chef worth her knife kit will tell you, these space-efficient, workhouse gadgets do a lot more than that. But you don't need to be a pro to create fresh, fizzy sodas, quick cakes, light takes on classic sauces, and more with your whipping siphon—it's an ideal tool for the curious home cook as well.

Intrigued? Check out these 10 siphon fun facts, then get ready to make some magic in the kitchen.

10 Fun Facts About Whipping Siphons

How to Charge, Use, Clean, and Store Your Siphon

Choosing & Buying Equipment

Think back: Do you remember that first, truly incredible cup of coffee? The one that changed the way you look at the beverage that wakes up much of the world each morning? Most coffee lovers didn't start out that way; it takes a remarkable brew to show us just how sweet and balanced, refreshing and complex this bewitching beverage can be. Now, we're going to teach you to surpass that memorable cup at home, by combining the art of extraction with state-of-the-art brewing practices.

Quest for the Perfect Cup

Get Going

One of the advantages of making whipped cream in a whipping siphon is that we can modify it in many ways to produce the desired results. Here, we create a “skinny” whipped cream that uses gelatin to yield thickness and stability in the absence of fat from heavy cream. Gelatin (and a little xanthan, if you have it) helps hold a foam without introducing any extra fat, and because it’s a colorless and tasteless additive, it won’t compromise flavor. 

Serve as desired on pumpkin pie or on a perfect slice of man meat—we won’t judge.

Warning: NSFW.

Skinny Whip: Hella Flavor, Nada Fat

World’s Best Whipped Cream

First Things First: Mastering Whipped Cream

We’ve come to expect more from our sodas, like antioxidants and vitamin C, and this ruby-red bubbler delivers. Tart and tangy, it’s a refreshing pop for your taste buds. You might even say it’s crantastic! OK, maybe that’s more like something your mom would say. 

For the freshest juice, purée your own cranberries. Or buy pure cranberry juice for soda on the fly. Just charge your siphon three times, chill, and serve. For an adult version, add a shot of vodka and a lime wedge, and you’ll have yourself one spruced-up cape cod cocktail. Mom’s going to love that.

Cranberry Soda

Cherry Cola

We’re always on the hunt for an amazing hangover cure. (Are you surprised?) Recently, rumors circulated that lemon-lime soda helps with hangover symptoms by increasing the activity of two enzymes that help our body process alcohol. Sounds good to us. Even if you’re already in tip-top shape, citrusy soda is a refreshing, sparkly energizer. 

In this recipe, you’ll make a large batch (100 grams) of the flavoring component because it’s too hard to measure smaller amounts. You’ll use only a minuscule amount (3 grams) to make four liters of soda, so you’ll have plenty extra on hand for when it’s needed most.
 
Mix citrus essential oils with Everclear for a base level of bright citrus flavor. High-proof alcohol disperses the oils, making it possible to mix them with water. Add caffeine for a little extra pep to your pop. Pour into a siphon and charge with three CO2 cartridges for the most effective effervescence. Then chill and serve as desired—perhaps with a shot of vodka. Hair of the dog, anyone?

Lemon-Lime Soda

Bored with the fizzy frozen drink selection at the convenience store? Now you can make your own, and in any flavor—not just cola, cherry, or blue. We’ll show you how to make frozen carbonated beverages at home using nothing more than a whipping siphon and a little carbon dioxide. The brain freeze will be worth it, no question.

Start with your favorite soda or juice flavor—just about any will do—and put it in your siphon. Then charge that baby up with some CO2 cartridges and freeze until the liquid inside is supercooled. Now, release the excess pressure and pour out your soda. All the magic happens in the freezer—your beverage base retains bubbles of carbon dioxide while the liquid around them freezes. The result is basically a bubbly slushy. Mmm. 

Try flavors like bitter orange, root beer, or cherry. We include fructose to sweeten and add viscosity. Phosphoric and citric acid give the Slurp-E that sour candy–like tartness. Now you can [“wheeze that juice”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPn6sqGUM5A) whenever you want. And feed it to your caveman, if you’re into that kind of thing.

(PS: We’re calling this concoction a “Slurp-E” in order to avoid infringing on 7-Eleven’s trademark. We tried calling it a “Slurpie” but ended up vetoing it because it looked like “slurp pie.” Ew.)

Homemade Slurp-E

Sparkling Sodas

Just like with cold foams, we can modify hot foams with modernist ingredients to produce a desired outcome. In this recipe, we cut the fat in half, but we’re still able to create a durable and delicious foam. In the absence of egg yolks, we use lambda carrageenan, a tasteless, naturally occurring thickening agent, to help stabilize the sauce and create a velvety, mousselike texture. For extra flavor, we add citric acid and champagne vinegar. (If you don’t have citric acid, use 20 grams of lemon juice instead.)

To reserve warm, use a holding bath at [c 65]. And if you want to store your hollandaise for later, it will keep for up to five days in the refrigerator. Use it to dress up your eggs, or try it on roasted meats or braised greens.

Light & Airy Egg White Hollandaise

Get this: with nothing but a blender, a whipping siphon, and a microwave, you can have tender, fluffy cakes on the table in less than 10 minutes. This microwave cake has a deliciously rugged, spongy texture that pound cake could only dream of. The feathery layers easily pull apart for a sweet and delicate dessert.

This recipe makes a plain white cake, but the flavor possibilities are infinite. Mix it up with infused oils and sugars; try toasted sesame oil for a nutty note or roasted cocoa if you’re a chocolate lover.

Simply blend your ingredients into a smooth batter, pour into a whipping siphon, and charge with N2O cartridges to make a quick cake foam. When zapped in the microwave, the egg and gluten proteins work as binding and gelling agents, aiding in stabilizing a solid foam. The cake rises without a leavening agent because the air bubbles in the foam expand when heated in the microwave, puffing up the cake much like a soufflé. Because of the microwave’s inconsistent heat, the bubbles form unevenly, yielding a fun, fluffy texture. 

After just five minutes of mixing and 38 seconds of microwaving, bomb cakey goodness is all yours. And your friends’—if you choose to share.

Make Tiny Little Cakes in 10 Minutes Flat

Homemade Burrata (Seriously!)

Hollandaise—that bright, velvety concoction of egg yolks, butter, and lemon juice—has a reputation for being difficult to make. In part, that’s because overheating can make the delicate proteins in egg and butter unwind and lose their ability to emulsify, causing your sauce to break and become oily and thin. Even a sauce that comes out silky smooth and rich at first can quickly lose its appeal if allowed to cool too much. Timing, temperature, and proportion must be carefully controlled in order to yield hollandaise!

Modernist technique goes a long way with this mother sauce: Sous vide cooking allows for convenient temperature control (and thus avoidance of overheating). Serving the sauce from a whipping siphon makes it easy to reserve until you’re ready to serve it but also aerates the mixture to order, lifting and lightening it for a softer, more delicate texture. 

We’re on a mission to change hollandaise’s bad reputation, starting with you.

Bright, Fluffy, Whipped Hollandaise

People who say they don’t like fried food are probably lying to you. But this light, lacy, carbon dioxide–infused batter converts even the nonbelievers—and reforms the liars. 

Many traditional batter recipes call for ingredients that contain carbon dioxide, such as soda water or beer, because carbonation adds air and lightens the consistency. But as soon as you open a bottle of carbonated water, it instantly starts losing its bubbles. With a carbon dioxide–charged siphon, however, you can trap those gases for a heavenly texture that’s never too greasy or dense. 

This recipe yields a tempura-style batter that’s ideal as a crispy, golden-brown coating for prawns, pickles, green beans, and pretty much whatever your heart desires. Hell, batter that butter if it’ll make you happy. The components stay mostly the same as in traditional recipes: rice flour, which we prefer to all-purpose flour because it hydrates better and has a lower starch content; baking soda; cornstarch; eggs; water; and a vat of oil heated to ([f 390]), just waiting for food to come to Frytown. 

Keep the batter as cold as possible to help the carbon dioxide dissolve in the mixture and thus yield a lacier, crispier crust.

Crispy Fry Batter

Best party trick ever: Serve your guests a bunch of carbonated satsuma oranges, raspberries, or grapes. Watch as your friends start snacking—thinking they’re eating plain old fruit—only to realize it’s AMAZING FIZZY FRUIT. Yup, we’re going to show you **how to carbonate fruit using nothing more than your favorite produce, some plastic wrap, and a little dry ice.** (You know dry ice; it’s the stuff that helped us make this incredible [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/soft-serve-ice-cream Soft Serve Ice Cream].) All of these things are easily accessible at your friendly neighborhood supermarket, and putting them all together takes about 10 minutes, tops. 

How do you make it? Just arrange dry ice, a towel, and fruit in a container with a cover, wrap in plastic, and chill for 12 hours. That’s it! **It’s simple**, **it’s fun**, and it’s way healthier than a can of soda. What are you waiting for? Go make fizzy fruit!

**WHAT YOU’LL NEED:** 
A container with a lid (like a cooler, a dutch oven, or large Tupperware container) 
Dry ice 
A clean kitchen towel 
Fruit!

NOTE: You may be wondering how much dry ice you’ll need for this bit of business. We found that a large chunk, about 500 g, was enough to carbonate all the fruit in our large 47-liter / 50-quart cooler. The greater the volume of the container, the more dry ice you will need. But the amount of fruit you use will not affect the amount of dry ice needed. Got leftovers? That’s a good thing! Remember, you have [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/ice-cream/landing#/ ice cream] to make.

SECOND NOTE: If you get really obsessed with this whole carbonating thing, you should totally invest in a whipping siphon and [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/whipping-siphons/landing#/ this class].

THIRD NOTE: Just kidding. Posting three notes would be excessive, and you’ve got all that fruit to carbonate. Don’t let us hold you up.

Fizzy Fruit!

The Fastest Way to Make Funky, Spicy, Flavor-Packed Kimchi

Cooking With Siphons

In the culinary world, Angostura is the king of bitters. It was invented in 1824 in an eponymous village in Venezuela, and to this day the ingredients remain a mystery. Around here, it comes in handy—a lot. (Like by the case.) So it’s no surprise that when we decided to create our own bitters recipe, we used Angostura as the benchmark. 

Our version is softer and slightly richer, with underlying notes of vanilla and clove, but still pleasantly bitter and herbaceous. Muscovado sugar adds sweetness, color, and viscosity to round out the concoction. The best part: it’s wicked easy. 

Using a siphon allows for the rapid infusion of flavor into the molecules of liquid. The more N2O charges you use, the more flavor you can extract from the ingredients. When you’re done, you’ll have enough bitters to last a normal human quite some time. That is, unless we crash your cocktail party.

ChefSteps Bitters #013

As its legions of fans will readily attest, cold-brew coffee—with its **low acidity and rich body**—is well worth the 24 hours it usually takes to make. Given the option, however, wouldn't you rather make it in two? Enter the [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/whipping-siphons/landing#/ whipping siphon]. Yup, the kitchen tool you use for your favorite aerated pie topping also makes a flavor-packed coffee concentrate (no to mention foams, carbonated cocktails, amazing hollandaise, and, like, so much more). 

Just pour water and coffee in the pressurized environment of the siphon, chill it, go watch two episodes of [link http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/ Black Mirror] or something, filter, and voilà: perfect cold brew. No more waiting until tomorrow for that smooth dose of caffeine-packed goodness—the future, as they say, is now.

Quickest-Ever Cold-Brew Coffee

The classic negroni is a refreshing aperitif made from equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari. Our Byrrhgroni is a carbonated twist that replaces the London Dry with Old Tom gin and the sweet vermouth with the richer but less sweet flavor profile of Punt e Mes. Our version also includes Byrrh, a red wine and quinine aperitif, which adds some bitter and floral notes. Hence the celebrity mashup naming stylings of the “Byrrhgroni”—a cocktail with a bitter, carbonated twist.

This drink can be prepared by combining all of the ingredients in a pint glass and stirring with ice until cold. But we prefer to add the effervescence of carbonation in our perfect version. And it’s easy to do with a whipping siphon: Pour all of the ingredients except the lemon peel into the siphon. Add ice and charge the siphon with two CO2 cartridges: the first charge rids the siphon of air, and the second fully carbonates the cocktail. Swirl the chamber until the contents are super cold. Pour into a chilled glass and add a lemon twist to elevate the citrus notes.

Carbonated Byrrhgroni Cocktail

Everyone loves a foamy beverage. Think of a perfectly capped latte, or a freshly pulled pint of stout, with its round flavors and thick creamy head. Think of an angostura-dappled Pisco Sour, if you will, or a citrus-laced, painstakingly shaken Ramos Gin Fizz. What do all these delicious foam-topped adult beverages have in common? They taste great and make us feel special, sophisticated, and satisfied. 

In the past few decades, bartenders have seen our love for foam and then raised us—developing custom-foamed garnishes for their cocktails that play with flavor and texture to offer novel new takes on the old standbys.Take, for example,  [link http://smallscreennetwork.com/video/19/jamie_boudreau_molecular_mixology2 this Old Fashioned riff] from barman extraordinaire Jamie Boudreau, featuring a lightly sweet Maple Syrup Foam. Sounds good, right? Well it's just the beginning. Foam garnishes offer endless avenues for getting creative with your cocktails. Reinforce a central flavor in a drink with, say, a grapefruit foam atop a Greyhound, or upgrade that Piña Colada with a frothy [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/eight-more-amazing-things-you-can-make-with-a-whipping-siphon coconut topper]. You can also use foams to introduce a new flavor to the drink. Try a cherry foam on a whiskey drink, for example, or a vanilla one atop an Irish coffee. 

To get started, use the simple formula below to create an espuma, a light foam that will float atop your favorite drink. Begin by choosing your liquid, then prep some gelatin. For a smoother, more durable foam, you can add some xanthan gum to the mix, but that's entirely up to you. From there it's just a matter of combining everything in a whipping siphon, charging with a little nitrous oxide, and then chilling in a some ice water until you're ready to serve some seriously sexy drinks.

Garnish Your Cocktails With Colorful, Flavor-Infused Foam

Bitters, Cocktails, and Cold Brew

Strawberries and cream are a summertime classic. We wanted to give this time-tested combination a modern twist, so we combine strawberry juice, cream, sugar, and CO2 to create a rich strawberry and cream foam. By briefly poaching this foam in liquid nitrogen we create a bite-sized cryosicle that shatters crisply in your mouth. The delicate frozen shell gives way to fizzy strawberry and cream soda.

We use a centrifuge to prepare the strawberry juice, but any technique that gives you a pulp-free juice will work. The classical technique is to lightly sugar the berries and let osmosis draw out the juice.

Strawberries and Cream Cryosicle

Root Beer Float Cryosicle

Design Your Own Foam!

Infuse Fruits & Veggies With Flavor in a Flash

Seven More Amazing Things You Can Do With Your Whipping Siphon

Go Crazy! Get Creative!

Getting Bubbles In Your Beverage

Why Foams Form & Fizzle

How Infusion Works

The Science of Siphons

Geek Out: The Science of Foam

Coffee Equipment Guide

Troubleshooting Guide

Whipping Siphons Discussion

Ask Questions & Find Answers

One kitchen tool. So many delicious possibilities. Garnish dishes with colorful foams; serve fizzy cocktails at your next dinner party; make your own bitters, liqueurs, sodas, or cold-brew coffee; or serve up some carbonated fruit to wow your guests.

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