ADVENTURES IN MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY

Hi, sorry that I couldn't blog sooner.  I want to blog to you about the dinner I did on my birthday.  It was Molecular Gastronomy.  For those who don't know what that is, it's chemistry with food.  We had some successes and some failures but overall it was super fun and we ate some good food!

FRUIT NOODLES
The fruit noodles were one of the things that turned out ok.  We took my three favorite fruits: blueberries, kiwis and pineapple.  We blended them up individually and then boiled them in a pan with Agar Agar packets.  The Agar Agar makes it turn gelatin like.  Then we put injected the mixture of fruits into tubes, left them in water for 3 minutes and then squirted them out of the tubes.

But when we tried to pick them up they ended up breaking.  They were also way to slippery to hold.  But then my Mom came up with an idea to make ones that looked better.  She spread out the pineapple mixture  in a baking tray and then froze it for 20 minutes.  She cut them into long strips, we called fruit linguini.  And then Dad came up with the idea to dribble the blueberry onto the pineapple linguine and it looked this.

They tasted really fruitty!

SURPRISE BUBBLES
The Surprise Bubbles were supposed to come out as gelatin on the outside and liquid lemon on the inside.  But here's how ours turned out.  They weren't exactly a fail but they weren't a success either.

First we had to freeze the freshly squeezed lemon juice mixed with Calcium Lactate.  This took awhile and the cubes never fully formed.  So we ended up taking our semi-frozen lemon cubes and added them to a bath of Sodium Algonite.  Once in the bath they kind of formed a gelatin shell around the outer part and then we carefully spooned them out and put them in regular water.  The texture was kind of slimy and gooey on the outside and some of them were icy on the inside.  Think of jellyfish!




They tasted really lemony.  Some of them tasted sweet and lemony.  You'll know what I mean by lemony when you see this picture.

CHOCOLATE WIND
The thing I had as the biggest success was the chocolate wind.  It came out just the way is was supposed to.  I didn't like it because we used dark chocolate but my Mom, my Dad and my brother loved it.  We put it on ice cream with Raspberries.

NOT SO GOOD

The molecular burger was not such a success.  The recipe called for cold vegetable oil and we didn't have any so my Dad decided to we should just try and wing it.  But it didn't work.  The mustard and ketchup pearls ended up falling apart.  We decided that we'd just have the burger and it was still really good.

Here's what the pearls looked like before they ended up getting squished.

So, anyway it turned out good.  If you're interested the place that makes it is called, http://www.molecule-r.com. 

We have new found respect for chefs that work with these techniques because it looks easy but it's really hard.

I think this if 'bye until the next blog...and good eatin'!