And now that I've done one, I can work on removing the air bubbles, and seeing how thin, yet stable, I can make the skin. My plan is to make a piñon horchata sphere with cinnamon orange ice for an amuse this weekend for a dinner I'm catering. Nothing like waiting til the last second.
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I had to *cough* google reverse sodium alginate sphere but now that I have a vague idea.....Cool! You really do learn something new every day! (well mostly anyway :P)
This really is an old technique that is IMO no longer cool and never was really an appropriate use in the kitchen. I've had a few and every time they taste fine, but were more of a gimmick than a way of presenting food in a manner that makes it taste better. So what is it? Well, in regular spherification (you'll often hear this called 'caviar'), you take sodium alginate (think seaweed) and put it in a liquid. You then use a syringe to release droplets into a bowl of water with calcium chloride. The droplet hits the water, causing a chemical reaction that forms a skin of gelatin around the ball of liquid...hence caviar. In the reverse process, in this case anyway, you make a liquid with calcium and freeze it. Then you take the frozen sphere, and set in a bath of water with sodium alg, causing the same effect with a larger mass. You then bite into the ball and it bursts with the juices. Again, cool parlor trick, but not necessarily an improvement.
Would adding the calcium chloride into the liquid not impart the strange chemical/salty flavour into the sphericated (is that the right word? Sphericised?)? The one and only time I made the normal version, the sphere had to be soaked in water to get rid of it.
Fun though, isn't it? I still bust out the alginate and gluconate-lactate now and then. Who cares if the cool kids still do it?
CalumC - yes, and in fact I made them again for a cater and ended up tossing them. I consulted with Tri2Cook who gave me the other options for the additive which I'll be using next time.
Oh, man. I <3 horchata. It is the Super Rad.
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