You may recall laughing gas from visits to your dentist. But did you know that the same gas is also used in whipped cream and cooking sprays?
Here, for example, is the ingredient list of Lucerne Whipped Topping:
cream, water, sugar, corn syrup, nonfat milk, contains less than 2% of: natural and artificial flavor, mono and diglycerides, carrageenan. propellant: nitrous oxide.
What you need to know:
The scientific name for laughing gas is nitrous oxide (N2O), chemically constructed of 2 nitrogen atoms and one atom of oxygen. It is colorless, odorless, and has slight anaesthetic properties. It has been loved by dentists and their patients for over 2 centuries.
Nitrous oxide has another interesting property – it is highly soluble in fat. Whipped cream is of course very high in fat. If you whip cream at home, you know that the whipping basically increases the volume of the cream by adding millions of tiny air bubbles to it. Adding air to cream increases its volume two fold. But adding N2O increases it by 4!
Nitrous oxide is an inert gas, and is considered a safe food additive. It is mixed in liquid form with the liquid cream inside the canister, displacing any oxygen. This inhibits the cream from going rancid.
Once squeezed out by a trigger happy child (or parent), the N2O turns into a gas, thus turning the cream into a foam. But eat your whipped cream quickly, as nitrous oxide will start to react with the oxygen in the room and your cream will go back to liquid form within 20-30 minutes.
So as you can see, shelf life and volume have turned laughing gas into a food product “ingredient”.