How to hold the flavor and texture of the spheres

spherification

I'm doing apple caviar using alginate in my apple juice and calcium lactate as my spherification bath. Everything worked out well, the result is amazing, but after one hour my caviar turn out to be flavourless and instead of nice juicy bursting little caviar ball, it was 100% jelly like I was using agar-agar. I did rinse my caviar in fresh water right after the process (not even 2 minutes after the drops hit the bath). How can I keep this from happening?

Best Answer

An issue here is that alginates (in the hydrocolloids) are not great at flavor release. The holes between the molecule structures are pretty small and aromatic and flavor molecules (being larger) get trapped.

Ironically, Agar agar's network structure has large holes and does allow for good flavor release.

As the alginate shell gets thicker (the gel you describe), not only the texture changes, the flavor also gets trapped in the molecules and cannot interact with your taste receptors.

The thickness of the shell's formula (if I recall correctly) is:

L = sqrt(PI * Dca * t)

So beyond Brendan's good suggestions, consider dropping the calcium concentration and increasing time (measured in seconds). The way the gelation reaction works is just like how heat diffuses. So consider doing the cooking for longer at a lower temperature equivalent by running lower concentration and for longer.

As an aside, Martin Lersch has a free ebook called textures which has some tested recipes that might help.

Related Topic