Molecular Gastronomy gone wrong

As you may have seen with last week’s post outlining my attempt at homemade molecular gastronomy, I was supposed to follow that up with a week-long series detailing just how amazing molecular gastronomy is, and how any home cook could use it to add some flare to their dishes. But, as luck would have it, I encountered an epic fail.

First, I couldn’t get the mango purée to form a nice egg-yolk-like shape. I followed the recipe very precisely. When I failed the first time, I gave it a second go, and triple-check all my measurements. The results, which you can read about in my first post in this series, were bad. A mango purée that remained a purée after I immersed it in the calcium chloride bath was not what I was looking for. But as I learned in grade school, when you’re stumped on a tough question, don’t waste time on it, move on to the next one. So I did.

I moved on to the spherical olive. If you’re not familiar with this term, it was coined by Ferran Adria, who introduced it at his famed El Bulli restaurant in Spain. You end up with what looks like an olive, but when you bite into it, you get an explosion of olive juice purée.

In theory.

Again, I followed all of the instructions, first as outlined in Martin Lersch’s Textures e-book and a second time following Chef Jose Andres’ instructions. I got the exact same results both times: a blob of olive purée that would not sustain its shape when I removed it from the bath. At first I thought I was removing them too quickly from the alginate bath.

I then tried letting one sit for a lot longer, but after 5 minutes in the bath, the blob had a thick clear film around it, but it still wouldn’t hold its own once I took it out of the bath. There was no way I was going to serve that to our guests.

OK. My next idea was to create frozen Parmesan air (also from the Textures book), which I’d use as a garnish on top of a homemade mushroom ravioli dish. It looked pretty straightforward. Steep some grated Parmesan cheese in boiling water, let sit, filter through a sieve, add lecithin to the water mixture, mix with an immersion blender until it got all airy, and then throw in the freezer until it hardened.

The first part went well, and I thought that I might finally succeed at one of these recipes. My excitement was premature. Although I ended up with beautiful air, when I checked on it the next morning, it had failed to freeze or harden. This made no sense to me – how could this experiment fail? To my dismay, it wasn’t my fault, but the freezer’s. Yep, we’ve had to throw out half of contents of our freezer this morning because it isn’t working properly. The runny Parmesan liquid should have been the first clue…anyway, this recipe would have worked out if my freezer was playing nice.

Lastly, I was going to make a goat’s cheese bavarian with beet foam. This one almost worked out, and if I had had more time to tweak it before my guests arrived for dinner the next day, I would have given it a second try. Again, I followed all of the instructions to a tee, but when I went to squirt out the foam, I got a bright beet red foam-like substance, which while it looked very pretty, was not as foamy as I had wanted it to be.

The final result? Not a single element of molecular gastronomy in the meal I ended up making for our friends. I elected to leave the sodium alginate, the calcium chloride, the sodium citrate and my scale in the cupboard and instead focused on the basics: delicious recipes made with simple ingredients.

It worked.