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.

I would like to test the hypothesis that the ratio of sodium alginate to base is determined by the pH of the base, but I’m not really sure how to go about doing this, especially as the pH would probably have to vary at rather small levels (given that this reaction doesn’t seem to work in the presence of a fairly strong acid). I don’t know. I decided not to pursue this line of enquiry, however, and focused on cooking something that actually tasted good (for a change).

Before I could get around to my first molecular dish, I had some issues with the technique that should be addressed. During another practice session, I, apparently, grossly miscalculated the alginate ratio and ended up with a chalky mess on my hands. Not only did this lead to a messy blender (again), it yielded the same sort of chalky, icky pearls seen in the 2% solution documented earlier. Therefore, I went back to the Internet to see if I could find a more reliable way to produce alginate solutions.

I came across this post on eGullet that included this information:

the caviar technique is:

make a sodium alginate base: 20 grams per liter of water, agitate for seven minutes and allow to sit overnight….........this will be your base for everything…..I make 4 liters at once…..we use alot daily…

you will need sodium alginate for this….i just googled it and purchased some from a lab company…............

when you are ready to make caviar just use 100 grams of alginate base to 150 grams of whatever liquid you would like to use and lightly stir together (you don’t want any air )....have fun…........we are having a blast with it…....hot-frozen cocktail spheres, large spheres with smoked keeda roe inside them, large spheres with small spheres inside them, liquid center noodles, large spheres with fruit caviar suspended inside them, deconstructed dishes using this technique….....liquid nitrogen+alginate/chloride=toomuchfun

Having grown tired of sodium alginate failure, I figured I might as well give this methodology a shot. I was also planning on making some watermelon caviar for a recipe I’ll be posting out about after this, so I whipped up a batch, as suggested by the above post. This methodology, in terms of producing the alginate spheres, worked perfectly. One problem I noticed, though, is that the base, being pure water, diluted the subtle sweetness of the watermelon and I had to cut it with a sodium alginate base and simple syrup mixture (following the 2 to 3 ratio suggested in the original post) to compensate. While I think this wouldn’t be a problem for boldly flavored dishes, proceed with caution when deploying with more lightly flavored ingredients. That said, I feel that having the alginate base on hand is well worth any kind of concessions that must be made. I will continue to develop this method, however. I’m thinking about making a “sweet” base with simple syrup and a “salty” base with salt water in order to not detract from ingredient taste, but I feel like this might create problems of its own.

Speaking of problems, I was having considerable trouble dropping the sodium alginate solution into the calcium chloride bath in small enough drops to form caviar. The primary method for doing this is to use a syringe (Ferran Adrià’s recipe for canteloupe caviar recommends it, for instance), but I’ve had significant control problems with this technique (spurting, irregular size, tails, etc.). Others have suggested dropping the caviar through a hole in the bottom of a melonballer, but I don’t have one. I was a little baffled as to how to proceed, but then I was watching Top Chef with some friends and during the “Watch What Happens” special, they played Marcel Vigneron’s demo tap, including footage of him dropping caviar out of a squeeze bottle and into a chinois. The first time I watched this footage (during the season 2 premiere), I was just thinking that it looked really weird. Now that I was battling with caviar, I knew what I was looking at.

I went home and immediately filled a squeeze bottle with alginate base and watermelon juice. It took only a few moments to figure out how to get regular drops out of the bottle and into a strainer. This seems to work really well, although you shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry. It can be very slow.

I feel like I’ve got this technique down. The base has affected flavor but allowed much more consistency in ingredient prep. I feel like this might be a worthy trade off, but we’ll have to see. I’m planning on getting involved in the whole cyber egg controversy by trying to make my own Carrot and Coconut Over Easy (which is just an awful name for the dish) and I feel like water-based alginate base may mess up the texture and the flavor of the yolk. More to come on that, as I’m currently playing with the gelatin ratio in the coconut foam.