Angel Food Cake

A couple of weeks ago we got together to celebrate my grandma's birthday. I volunteered to make an angel food cake, with the intent on using the egg whites I'd accumulated over the past 6 months (mainly when making Pepperoni Pinwheels for a snack). So I started searching for a recipe that used a lot of egg whites. I ended up choosing one from Serious Eats.

Except when I told my mom what I was going to use for egg whites, she asked if I had been freezing them. I said no, they'd been in the fridge. She informed me that they probably weren't good anymore. Meaning my efforts to not waste egg whites for once had failed. We found a solution though: boxed organic egg whites (more in the notes).

Angel Food Cake (source)

Ingredients

• 
  5 ounces bleached cake flour (1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; 140g)
  
• 15 ounces cold egg whites (2 cups; 425g) from 12 large eggs
• 15 ounces granulated sugar (2 cups; 425g)
• 1 tablespoon (15ml) vanilla extract
• 1 ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice (2 tablespoons; 25g) from 1 small lemon
• 1/4 teaspoon (1g) Diamond Crystal kosher salt; for table salt, use half as much by volume or use the same weight (see notes)
• (There's also a list of what to serve with it but as you can see, we had our own plan.)

Directions

1. Adjust oven rack to the middle position and preheat to 350°F (180°C). Sift cake flour and set aside. Combine egg whites, sugar, and vanilla extract in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Mix on low to loosen, about 1 minute, then increase to medium-low (4 on a KitchenAid) and whip 3 minutes; the whites will be dense and dark.
2. With the mixer still running, add lemon juice and salt. Immediately increase to medium (6 on a KitchenAid) and whip 3 minutes more; the meringue will be thin but foamy. Increase to medium-high (8 on a KitchenAid) and continue whipping until the meringue is glossy white and thick enough that you can see the pattern left by the wire whisk. This can take between 2 and 4 minutes, depending on the freshness of the whites and the horsepower of your mixer. When meringue is ready, it should be soft enough to run off the wires when the whisk attachment is removed, but thick enough to mound up on itself like soft-serve in the bowl.
3. Sprinkle cake flour on top and stir with a flexible spatula to roughly combine. Switch to a folding motion, scraping from the bottom up and folding through the center, until no pockets of flour remain. Scrape the batter into a 10-inch aluminum tube pan (do not butter or grease pan); if you notice any small pockets of unincorporated flour, simply pause to mix them in. Bake until the cake is puffed, golden blond, and firm to the touch, about 45 minutes, or to an internal temperature of 206°F.
4. Invert pan onto its stilts or onto a trio of cans (see notes) and cool upside down until absolutely no trace of warmth remains, at least 2 hours. Slide an offset spatula around the sides of cake to loosen, remove the insert, and slide spatula under the bottom as well. Flip onto a serving plate, pulling gently on the sides of the cake to release it from the center tube. To serve, cut with a chef's knife, using a gentle sawing motion and only the slightest downward pressure. 

We served it with raspberries and homemade whipped cream. Everyone loved it.

• It wasn't until I got to Mom and Dad's house and refreshed my memory on the recipe that I got nervous about buying boxed egg whites. Seeing the word "meringue" brought to mind all the macaron advice articles and blog posts warning against using store-bought boxed egg whites since their pasteurization isn't great for making meringue batter. That ended up not being the case here: I think because the kind I got were organic, they were able to whip up as if I'd used fresh eggs (which I ended up having to use anyway as the size I'd bought was about one egg white short of 2 cups).
• I just used regular iodized salt. Didn't seem to affect the taste at all.
• Nonni gave me her angel food cake pan as I didn't have one. While it has a removable center, it doesn't have stilts (a lot of baking/cooking brands sell one with stilts, including Wilton and Nordic Ware). We tried to find a wine bottle to set it on but based on picture and video demonstrations, we couldn't find a bottle that the pan fit on. So we did the can trick. And because this was my first time making an angel food cake and I was nervous that the cake was gonna fall out because of the removable center, we also put an inverted glass bowl between the counter and the center tube. This seemed to work.