I’d never heard of “molecular gastronomy” until my fine-dining lover of a boyfriend introduced the concept to me. I’m still not entirely sure what exactly molecular gastronomy entails except fancy, scientific ways of preparing food. So I was feeling especially adventurous and decided to try my hand at one of the molecular gastronomic (gastronomical? gastronomy?) methods known as cold oil spherification. You essentially drop some hot hydrophilic (water) stuff in cold hydrophobic (oil) stuff, causing the droplets of water to quickly close in on themselves into a perfect, hard ball, closely resembling caviar.
Supplies to make spherical sriracha pearls
Tips to make spherical sriracha
Really cold oil. You’ll need to use a flavorless oil, like canola, and pop it in the freezer for a few hours until it’s thick.Hot agar solution. In this case we’re using a combination of sriracha and water to dissolve the agar-agar.The perfect height. You’ll drop the hot sriracha solution, one droplet at a time, into the cold oil. The height must be perfect; too high and your droplets shatter into baby droplets, too low and your droplets don’t sink below the surface. 5 inches above the oil seems to be a sweet spot.A tall glass. Your droplets need to cool completely before reaching the bottom of the cold oil. Use the tallest glass you have!
This (obviously) took me many attempts to finally get (sort of) right. And it works with sriracha, but I haven’t had the chance to experiment with other tasties yet. And this is also a bit different than basic spherification, which involves submerging a substance with sodium alginate into a calcium bath. The spherification we’re doing today produces solid “caviar” balls, while basic spherification creates a solid coating around a liquid inside. Maybe we’ll try that one day too. So if you’re ready to impress the hell out of your friends and win the hearts of sriracha lovers everywhere, whip up these sizzling sriracha science experiments…Sriracha Spherification Caviar!
