Whipping Egg Whites

Eggs, and especially egg whites, contain so much water that they work beautifully as leaveners in recipes such as sponge cakes and angel food cakes. Problems arise (pun intended) when you don’t know how much to beat the whites and you end up overbeating them. Once they are over-beaten, the walls of the individual egg cells are stretched to the max. That means, when you put the item in the oven, even if the evaporation of the water in the whites creates tons of steam, the dessert won’t rise because the cell walls are already expanded to their limit. The key is to whip them until just before they are completely whipped, so that you still have some stretch and give in the cell walls to expand in the heat of the oven. How do you know when you’ve over-beaten your whites? The whipped mixture goes from glossy and cloudlike to grainy and matte, liquid seeps out of the whites to the bottom of the bowl, and the whole mess starts to resemble Styrofoam. If you overshoot and whip your whites to this point, your only option is to start over with fresh whites.