this modern veg

This Modern Veg is all about what happens when I combine my love of cooking vegetarian food and my geek desire to experiment. I post recipes, techniques, ideas and I'm really keen to know what you think. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

After my successful recent spherification attempt, I was brought back to earth with my latest experiment. One of the things I’ve been wanting to make is a seaweed based caviar, to get a great blast of the salty taste of the sea. My first attempt though was a failure. I made a simple dashi from kombu, dried shitake mushroom, sugar and soy. This was then blended with the alginate and dripped into the calcic bath.

As it dripped into the bath, it dissapated into white strand, and i was left with tiny clumpings of opaque gel. The only reasons I can think of for the failure is that my choice of kombu was wrong. the alginate I used was from the Texturas range and it’s extracted from brown algae, but I’ve also read it can be extracted from kelp (or kombu). The other reason is I didn’t test the ph, and it’s possible the ph was too acidic. I’m going to have to get something to test the ph and then make up some more dashi and test it. Alternatively, I’m going to have to look into the seaweed issue; are there types of seaweed which will affect the chemical reaction and is there anything I can use to stop that happening?

Hopefully this is just a setback and not the end of the project, and I’ll have a successful recipe soon.

I’m quite a fan of sprouts in my cooking. They’re great for salads and I’ve used them to great effect in making burgers. I’m also a great fan of shiso, and heard much about the use of shiso sprouts in cooking, so when I finally tried them at Bacchus, I decided this was one ingredient I would like to add to my cooking.

I’d like to find a quick, easy and convenient way to grow this though, as you obviously need to pick and use them quickly and you don’t want such a lead time to grow them.

I’m no stranger to growing stuff to use in my cooking, I grow a wide variety of chillies every year, and am always dabbling i growing herbs that are hard to obtain in the shops. However, I wanted to see if I could find an alternative to growing the sprouts in soil, to save the time required to prepare this method.

So it was, I turned to my BioSnacky seed sprouter. It’s one of those things you can buy in health food stores and organic supermarkets with packets of seeds of radishes and various legumes that sprout well. It’s easy to sprout the seeds, you just sow them in the plastic container and add water, and that in theory is all you need to sprout your seeds, water and heat.

I set up a tray of the shiso and another of a radish seed I knew was good for sprouting in this method so I could compare progress and results.

Sadly, results weren’t good, the radishes sprouted in a couple of days and were picked and eaten way before the shiso had even started sprouting. Once they finally did sprout, they remain small and although not unpleasant to taste, they don’t have any of that shiso flavour I like so much.

So it’s back to the drawing board on that one. I’m going to go the soil route next to see what the results are there.

I’ve been fascinated by El Bulli’s sferificacion since I first read about it. I’m always on the look out for new ways to create interesting textures in vegetarian cooking, and thought that this technique would be a great way to deliver flavours to the mouth. Essentially, you make a liquid preparation, and then create a thin gel layer around a quantity of this liquid, and you end up with a sphere-like shapes, where the liquid bursts out when you break this layer. Spheres can be of all sizes from “caviar” up to “ravioli”.

I’ve never been a fan of meat substitute products where the aim is to replicate the flavour of meat (e.g. that awful veggie bacon), but I do like those products which seek to deliver flavours in textures not normally present in veggie food (I’m a great fan of tofu sausages, and buddhist chinese cooking).

I saw this as a great way of making vegetarian caviar. I’m not trying to replicate caviar, but more an experience of the flavour and sensation of the sea in tiny spheres, which you could then use in a similar way, maybe in sushi or served on blini.

Before I could get to that though, I needed to learn the technique. I bought a Texturas Sferificacion kit. I’m aware this isn’t the cheapest way to buy this kind of stuff, but it was an easy way of starting.

Ingredients

• Algin – alginate, a Seaweed extract
• Citras – Sodium Citrate
• Calcic – Calcium Chloride

Tools

• Precision scale
• Measuring spoons
• Syringe

I’m having problems with my digital camera, hence photos here are taken on my phone, and hence are slightly dodgy. I hope to improve the camera quality soon, but maybe not able to improve the photographer quality.

I followed the Texturas recipe for mango ravioli.

Making the preperation

First I needed mango puree, I took two mangos, chopped them up, then pureed them with my Bamix.

Next thing was to prepare the alginate mixture. Using the precision scale, I measured out 1.3g of the citras, bamixerised (used my Bamix) it with 250g of water, then measured out 1.8g of the algin and bamixerised again. This was then brought to the boil in a pan and allowed to cool. It’s very viscous and gloopy. It doesn’t taste of much, but it’s hardly pleasant.

The point of the citras is manage the PH, which needs to be above 4. Once this cooled, I blended in the mango puree, and we have the preperation.

Preparing the calcic bath

Spherification is the chemical reaction between the algin and the calcic, so we now need to prepare a bath to add our preperation to. This is simply a matter of blending 5g of the calcic with 1000g of water and putting it in a large bowl or similar. I also had a another bowl of water to drop the spheres in to wash them, to slow down the spherification. The process doesn’t stop and you end up with hard spheres if you leave them long enough.

Making caviar

My first attempt was to make mango caviar. I loaded up my syringe and dripped the preparation into the bath.

It was tricky at first and I think it could be down to the syringe. It didn’t drip very well, and it started becoming more like noodles. Eventually I got the hang of it, but I still think I’ll need to modify the syringe or get a different one.The caviar themselves are fun to eat. They’re pretty much as you’d expect. The gel layer doesn’t taste of much and the algin doesn’t seem to have affected the flavour.

Ravioli

Now this is hard, and I was unable to master this technique, but I ended up with a couple of successes. The aim is to load up your dosing spoon and pour it into the calcic. I had a similar experience to many others that I’d read in various forms on the web, and ended up with tadpoles.

This was really quite a fun experience to eat though. Once again, the gel was fairly tasteless and you got the burst of flavour. They were also quite tough and you can manhandle them a fair bit.

Conclusion

This is definitely something I’m going to use again. Like I mentioned, I want to make vegetarian caviar, but also I’m thinking of making sweet and sour caviar, i.e. two types, one with tamarind, the other with some kind of sugar. I wonder what the combination of two types of caviar will be like. I’m also thinking this could be a great chilli delivery system. As for the mango, I didn’t think the flavour was all that interesting, but then I live in the UK, and we don’t get the best mangoes. I should have also probably paired the ravioli with something. But the purpose of this was to experiment with the technique before creating recipes, so I’m happy with the way things turned out.