First round playing with the molecular gastronomy cookbook

Here is photographic evidence to support my decision to broaden the scope of blog :)

From the get go, we realized this was going to be difficult. The measurements in the recipe (pg. 55) from the kymos collection were in grams. So we had to weigh out our liquids on a scale instead of using measuring cups.

250g cranberry juice



We then mixed the setting bath according to the recipe. Mike has all this crap in his apartment that ended up being really useful- little sauce cups to hold the different chemicals, an immersion blender, and tons of chop sticks.

setting bath:
500g water
2.5g calcium chloride



Then we mixed the cranberry juice with sodium alginate to make the "caviar" gel... the texture was off-putting. It looked like one of those smoothies that has too much protein powder in it.

Cranberry mixture:
250g cranberry juice
2g sodium alginate



We put that mixture into the dropper from the kit, and slowly tried to create the little spheres that look like caviar. The first attempt went OK.



That is, they looked ok... They tasted like nothing. But with a really strange consistency...



The second try failed. This time I tried tomato juice, but I clearly did not adjust the pH balance correctly. I also am clearly a beginner at this because I forgot to take pictures of the steps where we added the sodium citrate to adjust the pH to the right level to set in the bath. We had to adjust the cranberry juice too.



The last batch produced the nicest spheres. They make for the prettiest picture at least. Too bad I don't remember what kind of caviar it is... potentially my Dr. Pepper batch...



Alas, we stopped messing with it for now. I think this summer I will get some real recipes to try my hand it.

Post 2... or, oh yeah, that blog i was going to start...

I finished my thesis so now I can turn my time back to seeing if I can actually enjoy writing. I'm skeptical, but we'll see. I am also "relaunching" the blog. I originally thought it was going to be mostly about molecular gastronomy, but our first try at that went so poorly that I just don't think I could sustain talking about it (let alone attempting to do it) for very long. So ignore that first post really. Its long and boring, but I don't want to delete it... so its going to just sit there out of place.

I have taken up the habit of cooking something for at least one of the meals of the day and I've gotten bored of cooking the same old stuff all the time. I'm planning to use this space to log the things I attempt to recreate myself in my kitchen.

Next post: uploading some pics I've been too lazy to put up for a while...