A little while ago, I ordered some wacky supplies from http://www.willpowder.net which sells small quantities of wacky chemicals for cooking. Got the stuff yesterday, and as I mentioned before, immediately tried to make orange “air” which basically involves putting a gram or so of lecithin in 300g of orange juice, and frothing with a stick blender. The lecithin stabilizes the foam, and so you can just eat spoonfuls of the stuff. It’s quite interesting, and absolutely trivial to make.

Tonight, I wanted to try “spherization” which is, as I understand it, something Ferran Adria at El Bulli pioneered a couple years ago. It basically involves taking some non-acidic liquid (ph>4), mixing it with sodium alginate, then using a spoon, or a syringe, to make little spheres (hence the name of the technique) into a calcium chloride bath, which turns the exterior layer of the sphere into a gelatinous (probably not the correct term to describe what’s going on) membrane surrounding your alginate-thickened liquid.

This results in something that has a texture almost completely identical to caviar, for small balls of the stuff, and a very, very runny egg yolk, for larger balls of it. I used a recipe off of http://www.texturas.com which is the official product website of the Adrias’ commercialized chemicals. Same stuff, but more marketable names like Citra (sodium Citrate) and the like.

I found that actually creating the spheres was a huge pain in the ass, and frankly, almost impossible. So, I started cranking up the amount of alginate (this was in a bowl of Earl Grey tea) until I got something manageable. Was able to make between dime and quarter-sized spheres, though I wouldn’t actually call them spheres, as they had the flattened characteristics of (again) a runny egg yolk.

Still, quite odd to then roll one around in your mouth, bite down on it, and have a little liquid burst of tea.

I’ll have to try again soon. I think basically, I need to look around, and see what the ratios other people are using are for the alginate to the base liquid.

Fun stuff, though – the “creamsicle” with the orange foam, and vanilla soy milk is really good.

Recipe:
300g orange juice
~1.5g lecithin
.5C soy milk
1 dash vanilla extract
Sugar to taste

Mix the vanilla, sugar and soymilk until you get something you like (yes, super vague. Doesn’t really matter). Immerse your stick blender in the orange juice, and set to high. As the mixer is running, add the lecithin. Try to put the blade of the blender at the surface of the orange juice to maximize foamage. When there’s a reasonable amount of foam, turn off the blender, grab a spoon, and spoon the foam over the soymilk. Drink!

w00t.

Now, maybe the next part of the process is to make orange “caviar” and drop them into the soy milk for an extra orange punch.