Small Amounts of Molecular Ingredients?

[bigchef]

I saw a post here not to long where members where buying some MG products and recouping the cost by sending off smaller ammounts. Most of the ingridients are to much for most of us to use realistically but what ingridients do you all think would benifit most from sharing? Sweetners and such will end up getting used but what do you advise having had experience buying these thinks. I'm trying to start a free molecular cooking club and would appreciate any help folks. I would be great to try all these different things out and not be stuck with a load of stuff I won't end up using.

[Tri2Cook]

If you're going to have a cooking club using those ingredients which is free for the participants you won't have any problem using up most of the ingredients in retail packaging before you have to worry about shelf life being an issue. The only exception I can think of would be transglutaminase. That one doesn't like to hang around for too long even under the best of circumstances and only comes in 1 kg packs. Even that one wouldn't be too bad if you plan your classes/meetings accordingly for a few weeks so that you have lots of projects that use it. I've had to replace quite a few of my personal ingredients at home that I thought would be quantities I'd never use up.

[bigchef]

Good point about the trans. The clubs meeting once a week and we will be playing with a lot of this stuff but I'm going to see about buying in bulk so it works out much cheaper. I don't want to use the same things over and over each week so distributing to the members to cover the cost makes sense. We will keep some for the club and the members get to purchase it in small ammounts at a bulk price. The trans might be a prob though... it doesnt last long. Any other product ideas?

[DanM]

The Spice House has a few powders available in 1/4 cup jars.

http://www.thespicehouse.com/spices-by-category/molecular-gastronomy-ingredients

[Robert Jueneman]

My understanding was that transglutaminase will keep pretty well if you vacuum seal it and then freeze it, but I can't personally confirm that as yet. Because of the difficulty in vacuum sealing a powder, I think I would put it in a small Ziplock bag, squeeze as much air out as possible, and then perhaps poke a pinhole in the bag to let the air out dung the vacuum process. And I would do this with a mask and gloves on -- I don't need to seal up my lungs!

I have some in the fridge that I've been meaning to subdivide, but I need to get a mask, first.

Why Chef Rubber or WillPowder or even the ElBulli folks don't repackage it in small quantitates is beyond me -- seems like they could make a pretty good profit on it. I would doubt that even professional chefs would go through a kilo of the stuff before it begins to go bad.

[KennethT]

You might want to contact Ajinomoto about samples of TG - the reps are very good at giving pointers to help with initial success (and shorten the learning curve) - and they give out 100g samples (or at least they did). The 100g samples come in vacuum sealed foil bags. I have had success in keeping an open pack still good for about 2 years now. What I do is cut a corner of the bag and take out whatever I need at one time. I squeeze all the air out and then heat seal the corner, then put that whole thing into another vacuum bag, vacuum and seal and then immediately into the freezer. I have a non-defrosting chest freezer, so it stays about -10C without a freeze/defrost cycle. The key are the foil bags - since normal vacuum bags are slightly permeable to gases (like oxygen) so even if it's vacuum sealed, after a while, you'll get some o2 getting in. The other advantage is that there is an o2 absorber in the foil pouch. You can buy o2 absorbers pretty easily on Ebay or amazon - so if you buy a 1KG bag, immediately divide it into smaller portions, and vacuum seal it in foil bags with a bunch of 02 absorbers and put in the freezer... should last a long time.