Snack: 1712 Miso Soup Spherical-I 2010-11

Miso Soup Spherical-I

elBulli was well known for it's innovative techniques and one of the most widely known was spherification. The famous olives, all kinds of caviar, mussels, clams, darn near anything was fair game for the alginate bath. So I knew I was going to have to do a few. I decided to start with arecipe from the last volume: Miso Soup Spherical-I.

Prepping the alginate bath

The day before I was going to serve I prepared a standard alginate bath using distilled water. The water here in Philly is, frankly, terrible. Not just minerals, but even live algae and god knows what else swim in it. The alginate would set up solid if I used tap water. Anyway, that went into the 'fridge overnight to let the air bubble out.

katsuobushi, water, konbu

Then I put together the dashi. Pretty standard stuff: water (distilled), konbu, and katsuobushi.

Once the dashi base was prepared I added red miso paste and a few clams and let it boil for a few minutes. I shelled the clams and mushed everything up with an immersion blender

Strain

Then I strained it through a 100 micron super bag and blended in calcium gluconolactate and a pinch of xanthan for texture. It went into the fridge with the alginate bath overnight.

Making the spheres is trickier than it looks. It takes a steady hand and a quick pour to get them perfect. Fortunately, the little guys are very tender and take the shape of the spoon when you go to plate them.

My perfect sphere

As I made each sphere I dipped it into water to rinse of the alginate and then submerged it in corn oil. Although the spheres will merge when they're in the alginate, the oil keeps them separate.

Warming the ingredients

When snack time rolled around I warmed the spoons, spheres, and texturized soy sauce in a water bath while I diced some tofu.

2 mm tofu dice

Plating

Then into the spoon, add exactly 8 tofu cubes, a drop of soy sauce and we're done!

I admit that I didn't have the 3 year old soy sauce the recipe calls for. As a result, my texturized soy sauce really wasn't. Next time I'll just reduce some to thicken it before whizzing in the xanthan. As you can see some of the spheres ended up with a little air bubble in them. Next time I'll have a pin handy and try to let it out without collapsing the sphere.

How it tastes: Delicious. Although Beth initially thought she might have some issues with the texture of the sphere it turned out it tasted so good she didn't mind the jelly consistency of the outside of the sphere.

Equipment and Ingredients

The Books: El Bulli 2005-2011 - Yes, freakin' expensive. Check with your local library - they may well be "in the system" and available to be reserved.

Immersion blender
Super bag
Xanthan Gum
Sodium Alginate
Calcium Gluconolactate

A scale that measures in grams