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!

Free-range, Organic and Vegetarian Eggs

Hi everyone, it’s my first post here on my blog. First of all, this post will talk about chicken eggs. I’ve always been a huge fan of eggs. I eat eggs almost every day and it’s just tasty and super easy to cook.

When I was a little, I only knew one type of chicken eggs. But now, if you go to supermarkets, they have lots of different eggs for different needs and consumers such as free range, cage free, organic, vegetarian, omega 3, etc. They are also available in different sizes.  In the name of research, I picked up three different types of eggs that I had never tried before. Two different techniques were used to find the differences between these eggs in terms of flavor, smell and taste.  Moreover, at the end of my research I found something interesting about the nutrition fact. So, stay tuned!

What did I pick?

1.    Free-range eggs. A box of 12 costs me $6.

2.    Organic eggs. A box of 6 costs me $5

3.    Vegetarian eggs. A box of 12 costs me $5

These eggs will be compared to the normal eggs that I have at home which normally costs $3 per box of 12.

Techniques

First of all, I fried those eggs with a little bit of oil on a flat pan. Second, the eggs were boiled in the same pot.

Process

On the first day, I fried all the eggs on a hot flat pan. When the normal egg hit the pan, the white spread out immediately, filled up the pan and formed a long uncertain shape. However, it didn’t happen with the free range and organic eggs. When the free range and organic got its own turn, the white didn’t go all over the pan but formed a pretty nice round shape instead. But I think it’s just because the normal egg I used wasn’t as fresh as the others. Anyway, I asked my cousins (flatmates) to taste the eggs. I didn’t tell them which one is the normal egg. Here are the results:

Cousin A: She just preferred the organic one.

Cousin B: He preferred the free-range one because the texture was the smoothest.

My opinion: I think the free range and organic eggs are odorless and cleaner in taste. If I had to choose one, I’ll go with the organic eggs.

However, my experiment didn’t stop right there. The next day, I bought a case of vegetarian eggs. This time, I boiled them all together and put them in different bowls. I asked the same people as yesterday to do the blind testing once again. Here are the results before I told them which egg in which bowl:

Cousin A: Her favorites were the normal and organic eggs. She didn’t like the taste of vegetarian eggs.

Cousin B: His favorite was the normal egg.

After that, I asked them to guess which one is the normal egg. They came up with the bowl A and D which is the free-range and organic ones.

Differences

There are some differences between these eggs in terms of texture, flavor, taste, color, farming and packaging system.  After done with the blind testing, we experience the left over eggs and explore them once again. We noticed that each egg is slightly different from the other. Free-range egg tastes a bit saltier than others while vegetarian egg tastes very weak and plain. In terms of texture and color, the yolk of each egg is different for some reason. Organic has the yellow orange-ish color/brightest yolk and the vegetarian egg has the palest yolk ever. However, in my conclusion, these eggs might taste just slightly different and you won’t notice it if you didn’t know its organic or free-range.

Anyway, here are the truly differences between these eggs:

Free-Range eggs: Eggs produced by hens that have access to outdoors, fresh food and water, and may forage for wild plants and insects.

Organic eggs: Eggs laid by free-roaming hens that are certified organic feed. These hens have access to outdoors and free from antibiotics and growth hormones.

Vegetarian eggs: could be seen from the picture below

Fun Facts (sounds like Ted Mosby)

1.    In my research, there has been a pros and cons about the nutrient content of these eggs. But, my research shows that they all have the same nutrient content and vitamin in each egg. The difference could be depending on the size of the egg.

2.     In the first round, my cousins didn’t get tricked. It could be caused by “mindless eating” theory. “Mindless Eating” is a book that I’ve been reading recently. This book breaks down why people eat more than they need, why we use our eyes to judge and taste food more than our tongue. In this case, the shape of normal organic and free-range fried eggs were much more nicer than the normal one. So, the eyes might judge the nice one as the winner in taste and send it to brain.

3.     American magazine called mother earth news found that Free-range and organic eggs are pretty much producer’s marketing strategy. These hens might have access to outdoors, but, in reality, they don’t usually go outside and stay in the cage instead (because chickens always stay near foods and water supply located in cage). If you truly care about nutrition, I would suggest you to buy the real free-range or also called pastured eggs. Pastured eggs contain:

1/4 less cholesterol

1/4 less saturated fat

2/3 more vitamin A

2 times more omega-3 fatty acids

3 times more vitamin E

7 times more beta-carotene

4 to 6 times as much vitamin D

What are pastured eggs? They are eggs produced by hens raised on pasture and eat natural diets, insects and worms.

If you are interested to see more about the research, please check out motherearthnews.com

People are now becoming health and environmental conscious. They chose to buy these eggs because they know and conscious that they came from happier and healthier hens. What do you think about these eggs? Which type of eggs did you buy? And also let know if you want to know more about the “Mindless eating theory”. Cheers.