I’ve just finished reading William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country, and I really enjoyed it. More importantly, though, there was a bit about eggs that attracted my attention:

“Anabaptists,” Milgram corrected. “These are really delicious scrambled eggs.”

“I use water, rather than butter,” she said. ‘’The pan is a little more trouble to clean, but I prefer them that way. Anabaptists?”

I created a recipe for the They Go Really Well Together blogging event, this time hosted over at Le Petite Boulanger. The challenge was to create a dish using chocolate and meat. The initial discussion on the host blog was about mole and chilli. Rather than making the chocolate in a sauce for the meat, I wanted to do a dish where the chocolate was the main component and the meat was the flavoring agent. My initial idea was to fill a molten cake with consomme jelly, but I decided that would be disgusting.

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Molecular Fresh Fruit Plate: Watermelon Caviar on Watermelon Foam, Kiwi Noodles, and Pineapple Poi

Ingredients

For Watermelon Caviar on Watermelon Foam

• 1 Small, seedless Watermelon
• 100g Sodium Alginate Base (20g Sodium Alginate blended with 1 liter of water)
• 20g 1:1 Simple Syrup (boil 1 cup sugar in 1 cup water until sugar dissolves), plus more for whipped cream
• 5g Calcium Chloride
• 500g Water

• 1c Heavy Cream

  For Kiwi Noodles

• 1 very ripe kiwi fruit, peeled
• 1/2 t Agar Agar

• Sour Mix

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To make a long story short, my iSi Mini Whip exploded the other day. It was the first time I was using the thing and I’d just filled it with 1/2 pint of heavy cream. The directions, though, left something to be desired (I’m going to blame improper translation). Doing my best to figure out what they meant, I charged the cream with a cream charger and shook the whipped cream. As you can see, when we started piping, it all came out normally and then went off like a white, sticky bomb. (more…)

Note: This has been languishing in rough draft Hell for over a week. I apologize. I got swamped with grading and my experimentation is beginning to lap my writing. As classes end next week, I imagine I’ll be getting back to a more sane schedule.

Following the previous caviar outing, I decided to step into the kitchen, once again, to see if I could further perfect the caviar making technique (and hopefully arrive at a general methodology) for producing this stuff. Additionally, in the course of browsing the internet (and watching television) for caviar information, I came across some useful tidbits.

First, having settled on a 1% by weight alginate solution, I set out to try lower percentages to see what the lowest ratio I could get would be. I’m primarily interested in experimenting with this, as sodium alginate is rather expensive ($21 per pound from L’Epicerie). So, I whipped up a 1% calcium chloride bath and a 0.5% solution of sodium alginate and sugar water. This resulted in caviar that were balled but seemed noticeably more “fragile”. I’m not entirely sure that this would be a valid ratio for production environments, but it does appear to work. One of the concerns I have, though, is that several posters on the eGullet Forums have mentioned that the ratio of alginate to calcium chloride depends on the pH of the base being gelled. I can’t find any confirmation of this (beyond anecdotal evidence) and, as I’m now reading Herve This’s (rather awful) book on molecular gastronomy, I’m disinclined to trust this sort of evidence. Nonetheless, this may prove to be true and I would be wary of using really dilute sodium alginate solutions in the future. (more…)

After the Xantham Gum explorations, I decided to start toying with the instant classic technique of making caviar. Everyone either eventually starts playing with ravioli or caviar early on in the process of fooling around with food chemistry, because it’s just so shockingly cool.

Anyway, when I first started working on this, I was still trying to use volume based measurements to work out the magic ratio to make small spherical pellets any liquid. Also, I’d read some brief mentions that reversing the typical formula of sodium alginate plus ingredient into a calcium chloride and water bath yielded better results. (more…)

This blog is going into production a little faster than I had anticipated due to the arrival of a shipment of chemicals and the inevitable playing around in the kitchen that results from having new toys. Nonetheless, I’m starting to have some problems with some of the availability of recipes for doing some of the more out-there future cooking suggested by the molecular gastronomy boosters.

My main problem is a lack of recipes in British measurements, as most of the formulas I’ve found are in metric and, more frustratingly, are articulated in terms of mass rather than volume. So, I set out the other day to see what I could discover using volume rather than mass. (more…)