Biologists as tinkerers

If you like to tinker you might think that the career for you would be engineering, computer science or even an academic career in the physical sciences. However one option that may have not crossed your mind if the life sciences. Every day in the lab we try to dream up of innovative ways inorder to tease apart the molecular components of life, whether it be "bucket biochemistry", microinjecting cells, or constructing new genes inorder to test our current hypothesis. We tinker with life.

So what type of activities do we enjoy we don't play around in the lab? Well the following video was taken in the lab on such an occasion. Over beers at the local pub we the Rapoport lab members challenged our neighbors (the Blenis lab) to a fry-off - as in which lab could deep-fry the most esoteric food item. What did the Rapopot lab decide to deep fry?

Beer foam.

And so one day after happy hour we experimented. The plan was to combine beer and liquid nitrogen inorder to end up with a solid beer foam mass that could be dipped into beer batter and then be dipped in a deep-fryer.

Here's the a video of the second instalment of our quest for deep fried beer foam:

Very recently we had a third session where we actually performed the deep frying. Out of six or seven attempts, we successfully fried three chunks of beer. Unfortunately the foam was obliterated during the cooking process (not enough gelatin!), and instead the hard crusted fried batter surrounded a cold liquid beer interior with a central ice core. It was similar to eating a soup dumpling, just replace the soup with a cold brew. And yes I must say that it was a pleasant experience. There are videos and photos of the third trial, and I may try to compile those into a youtube clip. And if one day we succeed in deep-frying beer foam, I'll let you know.

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the foam needs to be stabilized with something... maybe with some beer and a little egg white (is there chick lab on your corridor) you could whip up a sort of beer foam meringue, which might be stable enough to deep fry.

Good idea. We thought that gelatin would do the trick, but you may be right, egg whites could be better.

(Foam after all is composed of denatured protein - egg whites being an excellent source of that. Does anyone out there know what type of protein makes the best foam?)

Meringue is disgusting - I do not approve. I can assure you that an egg beer would not be a crowd pleaser.

Being one of the privileged few to have attended this experiment in molecular gastronomy, I think one of the problems with the deep fried beer foam was bitterness. With the exception of the Belgians, beer flavour is largely a tug of war between sweet (malt) and bitter (hops). Different styles may tug one way or the other, but the beer foam was too far to the bitter. I'd suggest including some sugar in the batter next time to counteract what appears to be a selective segregation of the hop component to the foam. Even better would be to use some DME (dried malt extract) in order to keep the beer essence in play.

Rather than trying to make beer foam and then freeze it, I think you might want to try using the liquid nitrogen to foam the beer (much as nitrogen gas is used in, e.g., Guinness). If you could rig up something that would percolate boiling nitrogen through beer, you should be able to both create foam and freeze it in one go.

Byron,

Thanks for the tips, right now we are still trying out different approaches, and we will fearlessly try out anything (maybe the correct word is crazy). I do like the idea of adding extra DME (although our cell media is also called DME???).

HP,

Ideally we would add the liquid nitrogen directly to the beer while whipping it in a food processor (as in this video) however the nozzle of the liquid N2 dispensing hose, has been stuck into almost every container in this wing of the medical institute. Understandably we are trying to avoid having the liquid N2 in direct contact with our food.

interesting perspective. And one i so far agree with. I've always considered myself a tinkerer. Many of my friends have told me i would be good going into computer science, and during high school i was in a robotics club. I thought i was going to go into engineering like my friends, but the more i thought about it the more i hated the idea. I still don't know what i want to be, but i found two that sound very interesting. Biomedical Sciences, and Microbiology.

who knows... but, i do know it will probably be more fun than engineering. (one serious problem was i could never visualise myself being an engineer.... EVER...)

haha