Food: Coca-Cola Caviar

Spherification.

What?

Spherification.

Oh!

Yes. I wanted to try out the spherification techniques used by high end restaurants and gastro-pubs to encapsulate a little bit of liquid in a thin, gelatin-like layer. The end result is something that looks like fish roe or caviar depending on the base liquid.

The recipe that seemed to yield the most success was the following ratio:

1:100 (in grams) sodium alginate to coca cola (aka 1% w/w)

2:300 (in grams) calcium chloride to cold water (aka 0.67% w/w)

The specifics I used was:
2 grams Na-Alginate
200 grams Coca Cola
~3.5 grams calcium chloride
500 grams cold water

Procedure:
1. Heat coca-cola and mix in sodium alginate, it will clump initially, but just keep whisking until its all smoothed out. Sieve this mixture and let it cool to room temperature

2. mix together the calcium chloride and cold water until the solution is clear.

3. Using a syringe, I held it about 1 cm above the calcium chloride solution, and slowly dripped in the coca-cola solution.

4. I left them in there for about 15 seconds, then used a tea strainer to scoop them out and dip into regular water to “rinse” the remaining calcium chloride off the surface

5. plate and serve!

Considerations:
I failed using orange juice, I don’t think the alginate was set up correctly and I’m wondering how the orange juice bits would affect the spherification.

Future:
I want to see about making dessert sauces encapsulated in a “ravioli” (giant caviar) to serve with dessert for a cool effect. we tried a few, but didn’t get the technique down. it kind of looks like a weird brown sperm.

also, if you leave the caviar in there for less time, you create a thinner skin which doesn’t keep the caviar perfectly round. the bottom picture is caviar left in the calcium chloride solution for only 8 seconds:

as compared with the full 15 seconds: