Honest Review: Spherification - Seedless Pomegranate Gems and Yogurt Drops

I’ve always thought molecular gastronomy or “Modernist” cuisine is fascinating. Many people don’t think of cooking as chemistry, so it’s really refreshing to see chefs taking a scientific approach to making delicious dishes!

One modernist technique that caught my eye was spherification. Spherification utilizes ingredients such as sodium alginate to form a gelatinous coating around a liquid. It is commonly used to make fake caviar that is filled with fruit juice, and I have also seen savory soup dumpling or ravioli spherification recipes.

Sodium alginate is a cool ingredient to work with! When you expose sodium alginate to a calcium solution, the calcium ions replace the sodium, and this causes a gel network to form. This is because the divalent calcium ion, which has a plus two charge, crosslinks the alginate polymer chains together.

Sodium alginate can be used in many different ways. The two main techniques are basic spherification and reverse spherification. In basic spherification, sodium alginate is added to the flavorful liquid, and you put droplets of that liquid into a calcium bath to form the gel layer. This method is commonly used to make fruit caviar because the droplets have a very thin membrane. In this technique, the rest of the liquid on the inside of the sphere will gel over time, so they need to be rinsed in water and served immediately.

Reverse spherification, on the other hand, uses a flavorful liquid with calcium ions that is dropped into a sodium alginate bath. This technique is commonly used for bigger spheres like soup or ravioli because the membrane is thicker. A wide variety of liquids can be used in reverse spherification, and the gelling stops completely after it is rinsed in a water bath.

When I was thinking about ways to apply basic spherification, I came up with the idea for seedless pomegranate gems. I love pomegranates, but they are such a pain to eat due to all the seeds! I prepared a mixture of sodium alginate and pomegranate juice in our blender, but another key ingredient that I needed to add was sodium citrate. Pomegranate juice is very acidic, but the gelling process won’t happen unless the pH is above 3.6. The sodium citrate is a great way to increase the pH without getting rid of the iconic tart flavor of the pomegranate juice.

After waiting for the bubbles to rise out of the pomegranate mixture, I prepared a calcium lactate bath. If you have calcium chloride available, that is even better because it provides a higher concentration of calcium. If there isn’t enough calcium in your bath, the droplets will break apart before they get a chance to gel.

I experimented with a pipette as well as a spoon to drop the pomegranate juice into the bath. The pipette was great for producing many small spheres, but the spoon helped me to make larger gem-sized spheres. After soaking in the bath for about 30 seconds, I would remove them with a strainer spoon and rinse them in water.

As you can see, the seedless pomegranate gems turned out wonderfully! Just for fun, I collected a bunch and put them in a pomegranate. Even though the spheres were much softer than a usual pomegranate gem, it felt like I was eating the real thing!

I also experimented with reverse spherification with varying degrees of success. I wanted to use a liquid that already had calcium in it, so I came up with two ideas: yogurt drops and rumchata shots. For both recipes I had to supplement the calcium content with some calcium lactate, but the natural calcium content definitely helped the gelling process.

The yogurt drops were pretty straightforward to make. After allowing the bubbles to rise out of the sodium alginate bath, I added a little milk and calcium lactate to my favorite yogurt. This gave me the perfect consistency, and I used a spoon to add plops of yogurt to the bath. Since the yogurt was so thick, it didn’t form perfect spheres, but I actually liked the droplet shape they took. I definitely noticed that the membrane was thicker for these, but it was really satisfying to pop them!

Next up was rumchata shots! I added vodka in my original recipe, but it was way too strong! I’d recommend sticking with a rumchata and milk mixture for a slightly alcoholic but highly enjoyable result. The process for this was very similar, and I still needed to add extra calcium lactate to speed up the gelling process.

One key difference with the rumchata shot was that it is much thinner than the yogurt. I actually boiled some chia seeds and blended them with the rumchata in order to thicken it. The chia seeds made the mixture look vanilla bean flavored, so it was a fun addition! As you can see, the rumchata shots turned out to be much more spherical, and we put the spheres in shot glasses for everyone. Throwing back a spherical rumchata shot was definitely a once in a lifetime experience!

Many people think modernist cooking is gross because alternate ingredients are used, but I think that is very closed minded. Science is all around us, and why shouldn’t it be a part of our cooking?? Sodium alginate is made from seaweed, and I think it is silly that critics shun it purely due to it’s chemical-sounding name. Would they be happy if we just started calling it seaweed goo? Oh well, more fruit caviar for us :)

Source: www.tastytinkering.com
 

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