Sriracha-Honey "Caviar"

I've read about the process of spherification for a long time, but never tried to do it myself.  It always seemed to much trouble to order the sodium alganate and calcium salt by mail order and set up all the baths, but on a recent visit to The Spice House in Chicago I was pleased to find that they are now selling everything I needed to give it a try.  I had to wait a few weeks due to a planned vacation, but this morning I made my first attempt at spherification.

My first thought was to make something that looked similar to beluga caviar, those very expensive salted sturgeon eggs that can go for hundreds an ounce.  But I really didn't have any ingredients to pull that off (although I think a reduction of concord grape juice would probably work), so when I started to think of other similar things I could replicate I finally hit on hot sauce salmon roe.  Of course, this has already been done but it was a good place to start.  There wasn't any fresh hot sauce in the house so I decided to go with Sriracha sauce as the base, cut with some honey for sweetness.

The recipe I came up with for a first attempt was...

15 grams Sriracha sauce
10 grams honey
15 grams water (plus an undefined amount to thin the mixture)
2 grans sodium citrate (as a buffer)
3 grams sodium alginate

I wasn't using a particularly accurate scale so I may have added a little too much sodium alginate since the mixture seemed to gel up immediately.  I started adding water and mixing it in with an immersion blender until the mixture was a little thicker in consistency than maple syrup.  Then it was allowed to sit in the fridge for about an hour before I placed the container in a Food Saver Canister and applied a vacuum to pull out any residual air bubbles.  After several cycles we were ready to go.

I mixed 9 grams of calcium salt in 1 liter of water until everything was dissolved for a calcium bath and poured most of it in to a tall glass.  Using a 10 ml luer slip syringe I "borrowed" from the office I pulled up some of the sriracha mixture and while holding it about a foot above the bath slowly depressed the plunger so the sriracha would enter the calcium bath in drops.  The alginate in the sriracha drops instantly gelled when they came in to contact with the calcium ions in the bath to form spheres.  After a few syringe fulls of sriracha mix, I strained out the spheres, rinsed them in a water bath and then dumped them in a second water bath for holding.  This was repeated until all the sriracha-honey mix was spherified.  Here is the result...

I mixed a little olive oil and grape seed oil in with the sriracha/honey spheres to keep them separate, they really do look like salmon roe and have the same pop in the mouth feel to them but a completely different taste.  Since this was direct spherification I'm not sure if they will eventually solidify or remain liquid in the center, reverse spherification would certainly retain the liquid center.  I have a decent supply of the required ingredients so I'm sure I'll be messing around with this technique quite a bit in the coming months!

"Melty" Queso Dip

Prior to Cinco de Mayo Modernist Cuisine posted a recipe for a Melty Queso Dip consisting only of pepperjack cheese, beer (or water) and sodium citrate.  The only ingredient that I had to order was the sodium citrate, which I eventually bought from Amazon.com and was delivered shortly before I left for a weeks vacation.  While I was down south visiting family I thought I'd give it a try.

At a nearby grocery store I picked up a pound of pepperjack cheese, the brand chosen mainly because it was on sale.  It was a little below the weight listed in the recipe (285 grams) so I threw in some Land o' Lakes white american cheese I found in the fridge to make up the difference.  The only beer that was available was some Sam Adams Boston Lager, which in hindsight wasn't the best choice for this application.  The 265 milliliters of beer was warmed up to a simmer and 11 grams of sodium citrate was added and dissolved.  Now the fun part, the cheese was added to the simmering beer in batches while using an immersion blender to fully incorporate each addition before the next was added.  There was some foaming here so if you try this be sure to use a big enough saucepan and stop occasionally to let the foam subside.  The result was a smooth cheese dip with a silky texture and great cheese flavor.  The downside was the strong hop flavor contributed by the Sam Adams beer, it distracted from the cheese which should be the star of the show.  When I do this again (and I will since I bought a full pound of sodium citrate) I'll be sure to use a much less hoppy beer, like the wheat beer they suggested.  A Goose Island 312 should fit the bill nicely!