Adventures with sodium alginate

[pounce]

first is there a way to stop the reaction of the CaCl2 bath.

You can't really stop the cross linking once it's started. You can play with mixing a sequestrant with the alginate, but you destablize the gel by doing so. In other words if you mix in something like calcium citrate (or a phosphate) with the alginate you slow the cross linking so your spheres or blobs might be more delicate. An alternative to mix calium chloride in your slurry and drop into alginate. OR I have seen at least one place make the caviar and then immediately freeze it in liquid nitrogen. At the same time keeping the spheres or blobs hot interupts the gelation because the chains are in thermal motion. That's the theory. In practice in my kitchen I don't seem to keep them around long enough to think shelf life.

Also, it's my understanding that there are many types of sodium alginates. Some react more and some react less with calci. It's apparently a matter of proportions of g-blocks in the alginate. I've seen various grades and viscosities for sale. If I was a big fast food company I am sure I could get as much of it as I wanted, but it's not easy to find as a normal consumer.

Something I have been thinking about is combining alginate with another gel that sets at a low temp. Make gel blobs and then throw these into the calci. In theory this would put a skin on them that was thermal stable. Then serve them hot to liquify the centers. This might work well for soups or hot drinks.

second are there anyother ways to make the caviar other than syringes

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Go down the craft supply store and see if they have any small plastic squeeze bottles. These work fine and are pretty cheap. They also sometimes have syringes. Look around the house for eye droppers. Nothing fancy required.

Some general tips for mixing the alginate. I found if I mixed the alginate with a powder like sugar before mixing in the liquid I ended up with less clumping. Also, mixing the alginate with a little alcohol and then pouring it into the stiring liquid helped.

[chefjancris]

just some thought on liquid raviolis.

i'm thinking of another way of making those liquid raviolis without the help of alginate and cacl. this method would involve thickening the liquidwith xanthan gum to provide proper viscosity, then pouring it to silicone mould resembling egg yolks and then freezing it then using a bath of concentrated agar solution, you dip the frozen orb and transfer it to a plate then let the agar set, once its warm enough, the filling liquidizes while you have a thin skin of agar holding the mixture.

anyone has some thoughts about it?

Edited July 20, 2006 by chefjancris (log)

[pounce]

The mold idea is a good one.

I've been seeing how people use molds for the alginate/CaCl2 approach to form shapes. All you need is a mold material that is calcium ion permeable. If you can make a mold that is smooth but can absorb some calci then you can pour in the alginate mix and then spray the top with some more calci.

I think freezing anything and then dipping into a alginate mix and then into calci would be cool. It might work for things that are hard to mix with alginate like acids and things with high calcium.

Edited July 20, 2006 by pounce (log)

[skidude72]

so today my sodium and Ca Cl2 came so i got craking. i tried to make the tea orbs... disaster, no matter how i did it the always coame out oblong and the flavor was very bland. which was a general trend i found after making "orbs" of various this. i finally made a mango caviar and at first aggain the flavor was bland , so i added some sugar and it was ok. so 2 more questions... how in the world do you make those orbs, ie technique spoon etc. second how do you make them more flavorful.

thanks

[s_sevilla]

what if you made a mold and dusted it with some sort of Calcium containing powder that would start the binding process as soon as you poured your liquid into the mold? Perhaps like the cornstarch molds used in candying and confectionary, but on a more sophisticated level.

Also, does anyone know if Calcium Citrate can be substituted for the CaCl2 as the reagent in the setting solution?

Edited July 19, 2006 by s_sevilla (log)

[pounce]

what if you made a mold and dusted it with some sort of Calcium containing powder that would start the binding process as soon as you poured your liquid into the mold?  Perhaps like the cornstarch molds used in candying and confectionary, but on a more sophisticated level.

I suppose you can always try it out. I would think that this wouldn't work out too well. You need the CaCl2 to be at a lower concentration and disolved. I fear you would have too much Ca Cl2 absorbed in your item if it is being set in pure CaCl2.

I think any mold that could absorb some Ca Cl2 would work. Maybe make our own Ca Cl2 ladden playdoh or something similar? Paper?

Also, does anyone know if Calcium Citrate can be substituted for the CaCl2 as the reagent in the setting solution?

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Nope. Citrate is a sequestrant. You need a calcium salt. You might be able to use calcium D-gluconate. I've seen it at vitamin stores, but haven't tried it.

Edited July 20, 2006 by pounce (log)

[skidude72]

i almost feel like im hyjacking this topic with questions... anyways earlier i posted somne of my experiments earlier today. later i tried to make maple syrup caviar, and well it didnt work... in the slightest. i diuluted maple syrup with some water and added in a little sodium alginate. when dropped into a CaCL2 bath they just dissipated, so i added more sodium alginate to the maple syrup and tried again. there was no improvement. eventually he maple syrup mixture turned intoa s almost solid, awful tasting substance, but no wheere along the way did it gell when dropped into the CaCl2. so i guess my question is, does anyone know how to make this work. friday im going to experiment more, mainly with Gerran Adria's recipe for apple caviar, so if i discover aything ill share.

thanks

Edited July 20, 2006 by skidude72 (log)

[BryanZ]

Welcome to the club skidude72. It's not nearly as easy as it looks.

Pounce, the idea with freezing and double dip is very interesting, though I doubt there would be enough alginate on the surface to create a firm enough gel that would actually encase the liquid when it finally melted. I would love to be proven otherwise.

In other news, I had some bad luck with a mango orange caviar. The lower pH did seem to have a noticeable effect but if the Texturas demo was doing it then there's no reason why it shouldn't work. They sell calcium citrate as part of their kits so they have no reason omit mentioning it as an ingredient. Like the rest of you, I'm quite confused.

[pounce]

eventually he maple syrup mixture turned intoa s almost solid, awful tasting substance,

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Hmm. Real Maple syrup contains calcium. This may explain why it solidified on you. What brand were you using?

Maybe the folks from WD-50 can share their maple caviar strategy without giving away the details. I haven't tried it.

[skidude72]

Braynz, if you make the mango caviar i think its realy dependent on the mango. the ph chart posted earlier in this topic ranges mangos from 3.4-4.8 in ph, so some will work. id say the best way to do it is test if it works , and if it doesnt add calcium citrate. although when i made it even though it worked the flavor was very bl;and, but that has been a general problem in all of my caviars so far. so if anyone has any suggestion or idea on how to increase the flavor thatt be fantastic. oh and i was using vermont maple syrup grade A, and it didnt solidify it just dissipated and dissolved into the CaCl2 bath. on friday when i focus ion el bullis apple caviar ill try doing the maple syrup by mixing CaCl2 into the syrup and dropping it into a sodium bath.

thanks

[s_sevilla]

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and I have no idea if it will work (I have a feeling it won't), but I wonder if putting a ball of butter into a rennet bath would be enough to coagulate a skin on the surface and hold it stable...if if you'll just end up with some good ol' curds.

[Tonyy13]

Hey guys, quick question for you... Has anyone recieved alginate from two different sources? I recieved a package of alginate from Chef Rubber the other day (cheaper than R4D btw), and it was a much finer powder than the stuff I recieved from R4D. I used the same amount when doing some experiments, and the finer stuff seemed to be MUCH more strong as far as thickening etc. The skin was also a more rubbery texture (which I prefer), rather than a set gelatinous skin (which is really hard to explain here). The problem was that the mixture just thickened too much on it's own.

Some of the confusion of this process might be coming from us all using different products. I noticed that the CaCl that I recieved was also seemingly more potent as well. Any ideas/comments?

In other news, my syringe setup didn't work as well as planned. Had a hard time getting the syringes to drip rather that push out all the liquid in streams. Some of it had to do with viscosity (which was hightened, see above), but I think that some of it had to do with teh syringe itself. More time to play next week.

[BryanZ]

That's curious because I've found the alginate from Will Powder to be a strong thickener in itself. Strange.

[Tonyy13]

That's curious because I've found the alginate from Will Powder to be a strong thickener in itself.  Strange.

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I agree, the stuff I got from Chef Rubber seems to be twice as effective however. If we are doing it by weight, it shouldn't matter though, right?

[BryanZ]

I'm not sure if weight is weight, so to speak. It might be that the alginate from Will Powder isn't 100% pure or the Rubber Chef stuff has extra additives. Or maybe there's batch variance from the crop of sea weed (or is it algae, I forget) the powder was extracted from. Possibly different extracting methods from different sources.

[pounce]

I have the stuff from Chef Rubber. In my research I have found that there are man many different grades and forms of Alginate. One company can sell 15 different formulations. There are deliberate differences in viscosity factors etc etc. Alginate is used in the sciences, medical and pharma industries and they have many tight controls. In general we don't know what we are getting when any of the consumer Alginate sellers are giving us a bag of "Sodium Alginate". As an example go to www.ticgums.com and search on "Alginate". I wish I could get my hands on a bag of each of the items they sell, but I don't think I qualify as one of their customers.

God knows what we are getting for Alginate from some of these companies. You can get Alginate for the printing industry by the bucket. I hope people aren't selling this industrial Alginate as food grade

Edited July 22, 2006 by pounce (log)

[djsexyb]

ok, admittingly i havent tried this yet, though am to be ordering my supplies soon, i was wondering, for the "cavier" or other spherical shaped creations, has anyone tried submerging the tip of the syringe, dropper, squeeze bottle, then squeezing out a desired amount of liquid?

this may create a more uniform sphere in that theoretically the liquid should disperse evenly. eh, just a thought.

[Tonyy13]

Yah, been there, done that. What I have experienced is grub-like long strands, because the boyouncy of the water bath and the viscosity of the caviar mix is not open to this method.

[skidude72]

so last friday i caopied the El bulli recipie for apple caviar... and it turned out great, so im gonna make it again tomorrow, but as always if im gonna have the baths i might as well experiment a little on the side so i have one key question... again any updates suggestions idea on how to make a maple syrup caviar..

thanks

[cdh]

Yah, been there, done that.  What I have experienced is grub-like long strands, because the boyouncy of the water bath and the viscosity of the caviar mix is not open to this method.

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Are the long grub-like things solid all the way through, or are they just encapsulated liquid? The idea of making a noodle that contains the sauce kind of effect is sort of appealing. Toss some real pasta with some en-noodled sauce and present...

Any idea if that could be accomplished?

[pounce]

again any updates suggestions idea on how to make a maple syrup caviar..

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I'd try adding some citrate to the maple mixture to act as a sequestrant for the calcium in the *real* maple syrup. Your Vermont stuff has as much calcium as whole milk. OR I would try with some fake syrup OR maybe try with some maple flavoring? I haven't done it yet. It may be that your high sugar content is causing issues. Try hydrating the alginate for a few hours in water than adding the maple.

[skidude72]

will try... two things then. frist is there anything else (common) that i can use instead of citrate and should i do a reverse... ie a little Calcium into maple syrup and drop into a sodium bath

[pikawicca]

Much to my delight the sodium alginate and calcium chloride that I ordered in the mail arrived yesterday. I've been waiting to make my first eGullet post a good one, and this seemed like the perfect topic.

First, a little personal background. (Feel free to skip this paragraph. You won't miss anything.) I've been a life-long kitchen-phobe: when I started working on my PhD and no longer had parents or dormitory food I relied mostly on take-out and the occasional hand-out to sustain me. Recently, however, I realized that if I can manage in the laboratory at work, then I should be able to manage in the kitchen at home. Hence, I've been teaching myself to cook and, though I'm still a novice, I've been happy with my progress. My tastebuds (and my friends') have been reaping the benefits. I find that I now spend most of my free time reading about cooking or playing around in the kitchen. (Incidentally, if there are any people within a reasonable radius of Princeton, NJ who feel like showing a novice a thing or two in the kitchen, PM me! I'm always looking to learn.)

When I read about "fruit caviar" and "liquid ravioli" I was dying to taste them. As I read more, it seemed like something that wouldn't be too hard to do at home. Thanks to this thread, I learned that Will Goldfarb's Room 4 Dessert in New York was selling both sodium alginate and calcium chloride. I called the restaurant on Monday, and the packets arrived on Wednesday.

(Apologies for the blurry photo; either I was shaking with excitement or I'm just a terrible photographer.) The powders came in nice re-sealable packages and are labelled www.willpowder.net. It's just a "coming soon" page as of this writing, but I look forward to seeing what other goodies they will offer.

I was eager to play around with my new toys, and so I rushed to make something. I was somewhat worried about acidity since I don't have any calcium citrate to balance the pH, so I decided to do a simpler variation on the tea ravioli recipe from the Texturas web site (the simplification being the omission of the lemon ice centres). I also used this post about liquid pea ravioli from the Hungry in Hogtown as a reference.

In my zeal I made at least one silly mistake. I added all of the alginate that the recipe called for to the water at once and then attempted to blend it in, rather than adding a little powder at a time and then blending, which led to gooey chunks that were difficult to dissolve (which you can sort of see in the picture.)

I probably could have dissolved these chunks by heating, but I was doing this for fun, not for serving, and I was eager to get some mixture into the calcium chloride bath.

And that's exactly what I did.

Here you can see a couple of tea balls floating in the calcium chloride bath. You can see the remains of an unsuccessful one on the right side in the middle. I definitely got better at forming the spheres as time went by, but I can't say I got a perfect shape every time. Still, even the deformed looking ones at the top look much more spherical once they're out of the bath.

Finally, here's a picture of the finished product. It's not much for presentation, and certainly wasn't the nicest one of the batch, but it's the only one that I took a picture of.

What did they taste like? Well, not to be glib, but it tasted exactly like iced tea. The texture was pure liquid. I experimented with leaving the balls in the bath for shorter and longer amounts of time. If I didn't leave it in long enough, they were very delicate. The longer they were left in the more durable they were, because they had a thicker skin. However, the skin has a bit of an odd feeling in your mouth and isn't nearly as flavourful. It seems to me that the goal of this particular preparation is to ma

[pikawicca]

Much to my delight the sodium alginate and calcium chloride that I ordered in the mail arrived yesterday. I've been waiting to make my first eGullet post a good one, and this seemed like the perfect topic.

First, a little personal background. (Feel free to skip this paragraph. You won't miss anything.) I've been a life-long kitchen-phobe: when I started working on my PhD and no longer had parents or dormitory food I relied mostly on take-out and the occasional hand-out to sustain me. Recently, however, I realized that if I can manage in the laboratory at work, then I should be able to manage in the kitchen at home. Hence, I've been teaching myself to cook and, though I'm still a novice, I've been happy with my progress. My tastebuds (and my friends') have been reaping the benefits. I find that I now spend most of my free time reading about cooking or playing around in the kitchen. (Incidentally, if there are any people within a reasonable radius of Princeton, NJ who feel like showing a novice a thing or two in the kitchen, PM me! I'm always looking to learn.)

When I read about "fruit caviar" and "liquid ravioli" I was dying to taste them. As I read more, it seemed like something that wouldn't be too hard to do at home. Thanks to this thread, I learned that Will Goldfarb's Room 4 Dessert in New York was selling both sodium alginate and calcium chloride. I called the restaurant on Monday, and the packets arrived on Wednesday.

(Apologies for the blurry photo; either I was shaking with excitement or I'm just a terrible photographer.) The powders came in nice re-sealable packages and are labelled www.willpowder.net. It's just a "coming soon" page as of this writing, but I look forward to seeing what other goodies they will offer.

I was eager to play around with my new toys, and so I rushed to make something. I was somewhat worried about acidity since I don't have any calcium citrate to balance the pH, so I decided to do a simpler variation on the tea ravioli recipe from the Texturas web site (the simplification being the omission of the lemon ice centres). I also used this post about liquid pea ravioli from the Hungry in Hogtown as a reference.

In my zeal I made at least one silly mistake. I added all of the alginate that the recipe called for to the water at once and then attempted to blend it in, rather than adding a little powder at a time and then blending, which led to gooey chunks that were difficult to dissolve (which you can sort of see in the picture.)

I probably could have dissolved these chunks by heating, but I was doing this for fun, not for serving, and I was eager to get some mixture into the calcium chloride bath.

And that's exactly what I did.

Here you can see a couple of tea balls floating in the calcium chloride bath. You can see the remains of an unsuccessful one on the right side in the middle. I definitely got better at forming the spheres as time went by, but I can't say I got a perfect shape every time. Still, even the deformed looking ones at the top look much more spherical once they're out of the bath.

Finally, here's a picture of the finished product. It's not much for presentation, and certainly wasn't the nicest one of the batch, but it's the only one that I took a picture of.

What did they taste like? Well, not to be glib, but it tasted exactly like iced tea. The texture was pure liquid. I experimented with leaving the balls in the bath for shorter and longer amounts of time. If I didn't leave it in long enough, they were very delicate. The longer they were left in the more durable they were, because they had a thicker skin. However, the skin has a bit of an odd feeling in your mouth and isn't nearly as flavourful. It seems to me that the goal of this particular preparation is to ma

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[pikawicca]

If it tastes "just like iced tea" why not drink a glass of iced tea? I can see the fun of playing with physics in the kitchen, but I'm having a hard time seeing how these weird science projects make the experience of good food any better. Weirder, for sure, but better?