Fruit Spaghetti

Making Fruit Spaghetti with Agar-agar powder

The other day when I bought the chemicals for my molecular gastronomy experiment, I also got the spaghetti kit. Finally, today I decided to make something out of it because I was so bored and stuck with my assignments. I’ve been planning on doing this since last week when I found this video on Youtube about making meatball spaghetti using agar-agar and chocolate. And today, I finally did it! Yeay! I’m pretty proud of how it turned out even though the sauce wasn’t really what I expected.

The sauce that I used is ready use one since I’ve been very busy with college and need to catch up with all of the assignments before my brother comes next week. I’m super excited! But I think I won’t be able to do all of them since I’m such a lazy ass. This brain just doesn’t work if it’s not urgent. I hate it. I even bothered my self by taking ginkgo billoba pills to boost my brain function but no use! LOL.

Anyway, I want to discuss a little bit about our super star today, which is agar-agar powder. Thanks to Minora Tarazaemon (in Japan) who firstly discovered agar-agar. In fact, agar could actually be found in the cell walls of seaweed (Agarophyte). Agar is being used a lot in making dessert in Asia. It is also known as vegetarian gelling agent and derived by boiling.

This recipe below will give you an idea of how to use agar-agar and how you can make your own creation with this spaghetti! It is very easy to follow you’ll have a lot of fun making it. The spaghetti kit does come with everything you need such as:

Agar-agar powder

2 disposable syringes

5 tubing

Recipe for basic agar noodle

Additionally, I also bought canned mango, Ferrero Rocher chocolates and Raspberry ready-to-use sauce. If you would like to make this recipe, I would advice you to buy the real mango because to be honest the canned one is not nice and totally has different flavor and taste. Mango is just not in season at the moment here in Australia and so hard to find. So, I had no choice but to use canned mango. For the sauce, you can use make your own using this easy recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/raspberry-sauce-33624

So, let’s get started:

Ingredients:

5g Agar powder

300ml mango Liquid

1.    Combine mango liquid and agar in a saucepan and stir using whisk until agar powder dissolved.

2.    Prepare the iced water bath.

3.    Bring the mixture to boil (add sugar if needed). Keep stirring and allow the mixture to boil for one minute and remove from heat.

4.    Let the mixture cool slightly (1-2 minutes) and fill up the syringes with the mixture.

5.    Inject the mixture in the syringes into the tubing and place in water bath for 1 minute or until set.

6.    Use the other syringes to inject air into the tubing to push the noodle out.

Tips:

1. ·      Ensure tubing and syringes are washed before use
2. ·      Run water or oil through the tubing before using to allow the noodle to be extract easier
3. ·      The base mixture will start to set once the temperature goes down. To prevent, put the mixture in the bowl, and place the bowl in the pan filled with hot water. The same way when you do fondue.
4. ·      If you find trouble in getting the noodle out of the tubing, put it in warm water for a few second before inject it with air.

Mango Liquid:

Blend water and mangoes in a blender until smooth. You don’t want the base mixture to be too thick or too thin. Add water a little by little so you can adjust it easily. Strain the base mixture and use as needed.

Water bath:

In a medium stainless bowl, place cold water and some ice cubes

Serving Suggestion:

Place the chocolate on top of noodle and pour the sauce and now you have it!

Let me know in comment bellow if you have any questions or want to share your own creation. Otherwise, have fun! :) 

Molecular Gastronomy - Magic

Molecular Gastronomy – I made caviars!

Have you ever heard about molecular gastronomy? Or gastronomy even? Well, I talked to quite a few people about what I’m blogging about and most of them don’t even know what gastronomy is. It’s funny that sometimes whenever I say gastronomy people will be picturing planets, space and astronauts..well, that’s what I thought too when I first heard about it hihihi..

In my perspective, gastronomy is about food, wine, history, experience and sustainability and how it connects to each other. On the other hand, molecular gastronomy is slightly different. Again, in my perspective, molecular gastronomy is a study or practice about art, science, cooking and how you can use science into cooking methods. Through science, new and modern cooking methods were born. If you love cookery, you’ll love this stuff. I’m totally not a science or chemistry person but I love cooking and found that this is really interesting. My favorite gastronomy/molecular gastronomy figure is Heston Blumenthal. He is such an inspiring person and he used a lot of molecular gastronomy methods in his show.

I’ve always wondered how he does it because everything that he does is like magic. You should check out his show called “Heston feasts” if you haven’t or never. So, few days ago, I found these techniques on the Internet and I was really happy and excited to try. The next day I bought a bunch of chemicals that I would need to do these magic tricks LOL.

There are many techniques that I wanted to try but I chose to do the simplest one, which is making caviar. If you go to Japanese restaurant, caviar is known as “tobiko” which is flying fish roe. Caviar that I made was not made of fish roe but orange juice instead. The technique that I used is Spherification. Spherification means culinary process of shaping a liquid into spherical shapes. It actually is easy to do but I found it’s challenging to get them in the same shape and size. On that day, I made it three times to get the right mixture. Later on I found out that the scale couldn’t detect a small amount such as one gram so I always get the mixture either too thick or too thin. But, I finally figure out myself how to make it right by adding extra orange juice into it. You can find the recipe below. I had a lot of fun making this.

The superb chemicals (sounds scary huh) we are going to use are:

1.    Calcium chloride

2.    Sodium alginate

But you don’t have to worry because these chemicals are safe. In fact, these chemicals used a lot in food industry and many food items.

Tools you are going to need are:

1.    Spherification Spoon

2.    Disposable Syringe

3.    Large bowls

4.    Mixer

The recipe:

·      3g Calcium Chloride

·      1g Sodium Alignate

·      255g orange juice (pulp free)

·      510g cold water

Steps:

1.    Fill the first bowl with cold water and set aside. This water bath will be used to rinse the caviar.

2.    Fill the second bowl with 255g orange juice and 1g Sodium Alignate and mix until the powder dissolved. Let it sit for a minute to remove any air bubbles. If you have a lot of bubbles on the surface, strain and rest the mixture.

3.    In the third bowl, mix 510 cold water with 3g Calcium Chloride and mix until powder dissolved. Set aside.

4.    Fill up the disposable syringe with the mixture of orange juice.

5.    Drop the mixture into calcium bath drop by drop

.

6.    Leave it for a minute until set and strain using spherification spoon.

7.    Tap off the excess of the spoon using paper towel and drop it into the water bath. Caviar is ready to use

Here is the final result of the caviar. I served it together with my dessert. 

It also goes beautifully with cocktails and you can definitely use any other juices. I will keep posted any other recipe and ideas on this topic so stay tuned! ;)

Let me know what you think and how you go (if you try it) in the comment below or if you want to know where to find these chemicals in Sydney. Cheers!