Spherification

Spherification is a culinary process that forms soft, squishy spheres by creating a layer of gel around a liquid Directed by chefs Ferran

Adrià and Albert Adrià, it was first documented by the company Unilever in the 1950s and later brought to modernist cuisine by the creative team at the restaurant El Bulli. These liquid spheres, encased within a gel membrane that resembles roe in appearance and texture, are a unique and fascinating way to decorate food in modern cuisines The spheres are often 6 mm to 30 mm (¼" to 1") in diameter with the smaller spheres resembling caviar and the larger ones resembling an over-easy egg yolk. A common product of spherification includes popping boba, which is a popular bubble tea topping that bursts with different fruit flavours when bitten into.

The process of spherification utilizes an interesting property of some gelling ingredients. For the gelling agents to gel, they must be in the presence of certain molecules such as calcium or potassium. The most common calcium salts used for spherification are calcium chloride and calcium lactate.

There are two main types of spherification: direct and reverse. In direct spherification, the gelling agent is in the base, while in reverse spherification, it is in the setting bath. A more recent technique is frozen reverse spherification, which involves prefreezing spheres before submerging them in the bath. While basic and reverse spherification methods produce very similar results, they do differ in the sense that the outer membrane will continue to thicken until the whole ball becomes jelly in the basic method, whereas in the reverse spherification method it will not.

There are some key things to note during the process of spherification. The spheres may sink to the bottom of the setting bath and form non-round shapes if the flavored base is denser in comparison. Therefore, thickening the setting bath to the same thickness as the flavored base will ensure that they float and suspend during the sphering process. Additionally, some gelling agents such as sodium alginate do not work well with acidic ingredients and thus should be used with caution, especially in direct spherification and when trying to make acidic spheres.

Works Cited

Logsdon, J. (2012, March 14). Spherification technique. Amazing Food Made Easy. Retrieved November 1, 2022, from https://www.amazingfoodmadeeasy.com/info/modernisttechniques/more/spherification-technique

Wikimedia Foundation. (2022, July 8). Spherification. Wikipedia. Retrieved November 1, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherification#:~:text=Spherification%20is%20a%2 0culinary%20process,visually%20and%20texturally%20resemble%20roe