And also, why is it hard (or impossible) to turn single cream into whipped cream?
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There’s some chemistry involved that’s above my paygrade, but the basic idea is that heavy cream has a lot of fat in it, and the little globules of fat have a protective coating around them that protects them from water – you’ve heard that fats/oils and water don’t mix, and this is why.
If you just quickly whisked some cream, air bubbles would form in the cream, and they’d eventually fizzle their way out. But if you keep on whipping, you’d actually start breaking away the protective coating from the fat molecules. Those fat molecules can now actually start chemically reacting, and there’s a lot of trapped air around them, so the fat and the air actually bond together, forming a network of air that’s been trapped in the fat, and creating a tasty whipped foam. But that only really works if there’s enough fat to start with – otherwise, air escapes too easily and you’ll have a much harder time creating that thick foam.
If you really put the work in, you can turn single cream into whipped cream, but double cream (or, in the US, heavy whipping cream, which sits somewhere in between the two) gets the job done much easier.
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