Balsamic Agar Jelly 'Caviar' Pearls

Agar pearls are very easy to make, and look effective and taste good on sweet and savoury dishes.  They keep for several weeks in an airtight container in the fridge.  They are quite time-consuming though, preparation is needed, and you do need some equipment.  A few years ago, one of my brothers gave me a molecular gastronomy kit which was a lot of fun, and how I first started making these.

You can use many different liquids for these, but balsamic vinegar is probably the easiest to start with.  Cold spherification makes solid pearls, it's a different method to make liquid pearls - I haven't mastered that yet!

What you will need

A tall glass, at least 15cm.  You are using a tall glass so that the pearls have enough time to set as they pass through the cold oil and form a spherical shape before they reach the bottom of the glass.

Disposable pipette

Small slotted spoon

High accuracy food/diet scales

Cooking oil to fill this glass, it can be cheap oil - I use rapeseed oil

80ml balsamic vinegar

1.2g agar agar powder

Method

1. Fill the glass with cooking oil, and put in the coldest part of the freezer for at least an hour and a half, until the oil is thick.
2. Put a small amount of the balsamic vinegar in a saucepan, dissolve the agar agar powder, add the rest of the vinegar and bring to the boil.  When it starts to bubble, continue to boil 1 minute stirring continuously.
3. Remove from the heat and leave for 5 minutes stirring occasionally.  You do not want the liquid to set, but it must be cool enough that it will set before it reaches the bottom of the cold oil.  If it thickens too much, you can heat it again to make it melt.
4. Fill a pipette with the balsamic agar liquid and release drops into the cold oil, holding the pipette just above the top of the oil, and moving all over the surface of the oil so that the drops individually form. 
5. Do half the liquid then, using the slotted spoon, drain the pearls into an airtight container.  Rinse out the pipette with hot water.
6. Put the oil in the freezer for 30 minutes, reheat the balsamic liquid (no need to boil this time as the agar is already well-distributed), cool and repeat.
7. Drain the remainder of the pearls into the container.  Being vinegar, they can kept in the fridge for several weeks.
8. Wash the oil off the pearls before use.  

Note:  You can see from the picture, that some of the pearls are oval-shaped.  This happens when the oil becomes less cold and thick, and the pearls drop too quickly.

The Flavour Thesaurus

One of my brothers gave me an interesting cookery book for Christmas, The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit.  It's not exactly a cookery book; instead it's a commentary on food pairings, some obvious, some definitely not so obvious.  She chose 99 foods/herbs/spices and researched 980 pairings of them, and described them in mouth-watering detail!  And with the description of the flavour pairings come the ideas and the combinations...!  Thank you!

Zojirushi Breadmaker

I'm now the proud owner of a Zojirushi breadmaker.  This is something I've wanted for a number of years now, as it is impossible to buy wholemeal bread to my liking in Japan!

I used to have a breadmaker in England, and found it incredibly useful - it's even more useful here where I can't buy the bread I like!  There are many fantastic bakeries in Japan, some chain bakeries (notably Kobeya) and many independent bakeries creating both rustic country breads and breads with unusual fillings or flavours, but nothing quite beats a decent wholemeal roll!

I'll add recipes as and when I experiment...!  The recipes included with the manual encourage me to be really quite creative, but have needed adaptation to be suitably wholemeal - the wholemeal recipes they suggest tend to use only about 1/5 wholemeal flour, not really what I have in mind!  But although some bread hasn't risen quite enough, every batch I've made has been really delicious!

I'm going to post these recipes on a separate website that I'm setting up, mainly for my own notes, Bread to make your mouth water.

Science Experimentation Day!

Sometimes it feels like my kitchen is my laboratory, where I create weird and wonderful dishes, sometimes it looks like that, sometimes it tastes like that too!  Those ones don't make it on to the blog, funnily enough...

But usually, I'm very happy with the results!  Today the plan is to create some new concoctions, so watch this space!

Alcoholic Architecture

On the same lines as inhaling your chocolate, an experimental bar has opened for 2 weekends only in Soho, London. This is described as a walk-in gin and tonic, a room of gin and tonic vapour. Customers are given a protective suit at the door and giant straws. Tickets cost 5 pounds for an hour slot and must be pre-booked.

http://www.viewlondon.co.uk/whatson/alcoholic-architecture-article-8134.html

http://www.jellymongers.co.uk/alcoholicarchitecture.html

Le Whif - the inhaled chocolate experience...

Do you like chocolate, but don't like the way it makes you put on weight? Enter Le Whif...

On sale from 29 April, this plastic cigar-shaped product allows you to inhale the aroma of chocolate for a quick calorie-free fix... What?!

http://www.lewhif.com/

Rice Cooker

This is easily the most used bit of technology in my home here. Before coming to Japan, I had rice perhaps once every couple of months. These days I eat rice at least once a day, at least partly because this makes it so easy! My Zojirushi rice cooker has a timer meaning that it can be ready to add my grated cheese at whatever time I want to get up in the morning! Warning: Japanese electronics can do nothing quietly and serve as a good alarm clock...

If you genuinely want to eat more rice then it is worth buying a rice cooker. In the UK I was never into rice particularly and so buying a rice cooker seemed pointless. But that attitude was for the most part due to the terrible washing up involved with cooking rice in a saucepan (a rice cooker almost rubs clean!)

This model is a Zojirushi NS-VGC05. You can make rice for up to 6 people in it, and it works equally well with a portion for one person. It has 2 timer memories and will keep rice warm if you're not there when it finishes cooking. You don't just have to use it for rice either, you can cook vegetables with your rice too, it says that you can make cakes in it too but I haven't tried that...

I've just found an English manual online for it and discovered that actually I can get it to be a little quieter! http://www.zojirushi.com/servicesupport/manuals/manual_pdf/ns_vgc05.pdf

The Japanese Tradition - Sushi

This is a spoof video from the Japanese comedy duo The Rahmens.