In the year 3000....Modern Cuisine Society!

About two weeks ago, I went to yet another demo. This was put on by the Modern Cuisine Society (MCS). The demo was on liquid nitrogen and the different types of spherification. What in the hell is spherification?

"Spherification is the culinary process of shaping a liquid into spheres which visually and texturally resemble caviar. The technique was originally developed by the creative team at elBulli under the direction of executive chef Ferran Adrià."

Huzzah for Wikipedia. Imagine eating a plate of lets say... garden vegetable ravioli. Except this ravioli is made without pasta. So now you have a plate that has every color associated with a fresh vibrant garden...the deep scarlet of fresh beets, vibrant orange of a carrot, and the vibrant green of a sweet sugar snap pea. These colors and those fresh flavors are now captured in spheres, held together only by a thin, almost undetectable layer of gel created from a certain type of sea algae. Still can't picture it? Alright well here we go!

Tray of Mango Purée Spherification

Encapsulated Mango Purée

Next up! Spherified Gin and Tonic! (Pat we are trying this out when I get back!)

Spherified Ginny-T: Classy AND modern

This was spherified lychee juice...it also had a piece of lychee in the center! So good...I miss lychee...

These pictures are pretty fuzzy since I'm using a phone camera...sure wish I had a better camera to use...eh? eh? anyone? *elbow nudge*

The MCS then showed us some other applications to spherification. They took cream cheese frosting and spherified that. Then they baked it into a carrot cupcake, creating inside out carrot cupcakes. Why go through the trouble of making spherifications for the frosting? If the cream cheese frosting just sits in the cake batter without the encapsulation, it will melt before the batter sets, resulting in a dip in the cupcake. By protecting the frosting in a gel encapsulation, the cupcake will be able to hold its shape long enough to set, then the encapsulation melts and makes a delicious frosting center.

Tray o' cupcakes

What? Where's the frosting?!

Oh hai....

What I want to try now is to make tomato bisque encapsulations, tuck that inside a grilled cheese sandwich and possible combine the classic combination into one!

The MCS also showed us some applications of liquid nitrogen. They took one of the mango spherifications and dipped it in coconut cream, then the liquid nitrogen, then back in the coconut cream and back into the liquid nitrogen. They did this several times and created this multi-layered coconut ice dessert. It was awesome! You could use multiple flavors with multiple layers and create any number of things.

Liquid Nitrogen!

 Needless to say, I joined the club.








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