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I attempted to make my first mousse last night, and followed this recipe for Pumpkin Mousse: http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/2077-pumpkin-mousse

The only changes I made to the recipe was cutting the sugar by about 1/4, and using 1% milk instead of whole milk.

Below is an image of the final result after chilling in the fridge for a few hours. Unfortunately, as is immediately apparent, it is not particularly "mousse-looking", and is instead rather grainy, a little lumpy, and seemingly too "runny".

I am looking to potentially salvage the large amount of "mousse-goop" I've made, and I'm wondering if I should try to:

  1. Blend it more, or...
  2. Add something to potentially improve its consistency. Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!

Pumpkin mousse

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  • I'm concerned that your gelatin didn't get completely dissolved. Is it fluffy or not? If the gelatin has clumped, I'm not sure you can salvage it as an actual mousse.
    – John Feltz
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 18:24
  • (This is the OP) Yeah, it is not fluffy. If I just use a hand blender, can I salvage this pumpkin goop into something else?
    – sir_thursday
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 18:27

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No, you cannot turn this mixture into a mousse. You have to eat it as it is - which is probably simply a tasty creamy pudding without the expected mousselike consistency. Even if it is grainy, there is no reason not to eat it that way. Unless you find it utterly impalatable, in which case you have to throw it away. It is normal to expect some failures with such an intricate recipe, especially if you have little previous experience with patisserie.

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  • Okay, thanks. What do you think the white particulate matter in the mixture is?
    – sir_thursday
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 18:39
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    Oh, that's very difficult to say. Your main risks were: 1. changing the ingredients (they are there for texture, not taste), 2. working with gelatine, 3. cooking a custard, 4. whipping egg whites, 5. folding a foam into a custard and expecting it to stay foamy. For any of them, I would expect a total beginner's chance of failure to be around 30-40%. So determining a candidate which is more likely than the others would require quite some detective work of asking you what exactly happened in each step, with you probably not remembering it in enough detail to give useful enough answers.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 19:02
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    Basically, if you are asking "how to prevent this from happening" - you should practice each of these 4 things separately in recipes which need only 1 of them, until you have a reasonably good success rate, before you try a recipe that combines them. It is not impossible to get it right, but it will be a blind luck if you do, and you won't be able to troubleshoot if you don't.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 19:04

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