this modern veg

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.