Mayonnaise, whipped cream and meringue, a new carbon cuisine

Aqueous solutions containing tannin, crosslinker and surfactant were used for transferring techniques used to produce foods such as mayonnaise, whipped cream and meringue, to the preparation of new kinds of cellular carbons. Emulsion-templating, i.e. leaching a hardened “mayonnaise” for removing the oil followed by pyrolysis led to carbon polyHIPEs (polymerised High Internal Phase Emulsions). The second kind of materials, obtained by whipping the emulsions, presented hierarchical porous structures made of cells whose walls had a polyHIPE texture. The third kind, obtained by whipping until stiff oil-free tannin solutions, was carbon “meringues” whose cell sizes were controlled by tannin concentration.