Caviar Experiments, Part II

After lunch, we all headed up to Culinary Communion to see if there was anything left of their equipment sale - a sad result of them going out of business. Everything was pretty picked over, but I found a slightly worse for wear metric measuring cup for $1. It was melted about half way up, but I only really needed the 100ml mark - so I grabbed it.

While Dan went for a post-lunch run, I decided to play around with agar again, and see what else I could learn. The Tang Caviar experiment was fun, but I was concerned the odd after-taste was from the agar, and wanted to test it out again with water. I also wanted to see if the caviar would re-melt, even partially, if submerged in soup-hot water for an idea I have for the current round of TGRWT. And finally, I wanted to see if I could tweak the ratio of water to agar to get less firm, more truly fish egg like caviar.

I found that the aftertaste was indeed from the Tang - so I'm in good shape there. But I also found that the agar spheres don't remelt if put back in hot water - which I tested by putting food coloring in the agar mix, then dropping the completed caviar into hot water. None of the food coloring spread out into the water, as I'd hoped. Finally, I reduced the amount of agar, but found the balls still ended up very firm.

I have more to test, but was glad to sneak in a little bit of experimenting today.