Having someone over you want to impress without actually knowing too much about cooking? A neat trick I’ve found out about recently is making “pearls” or “caviar” from a liquid. You can use liquor, or juice, or well basically any liquid that can be set with gelatin (sorry no raw pineapple juice).
The restaurant I work at uses them for all kinds of things; horseradish pearls on a raw oyster, in cocktails, in desserts, you name it. They are surprisingly simple for how fancy they are and only require 3 weirdish things, which aren’t even that weird. You will also need gelatin - we use gelatin sheets here, but granulated will work as well as long as it is dissolved properly.
They are - a squeeze bottle, about a litre of oil (which can be reused and re-purposed), and agar, which is a seaweed extract used to thicken (try your local asian market, it’s pretty common).
To make pearls, first you need to thoroughly chill your oil. Place it in a deep container in your freezer. It’s best to use a neutral oil such as sunflower, canola, or grapeseed. Do not use olive oil. It is way too expensive, and it will get cloudy and rubbery when chilled. You can still use it if it’s cloudy, but it won’t look as nice. The oil is used solely as a liquid that can get colder than water. You might be able to use something like vodka, which also doesn’t freeze, but I’ve never tried it.
The oil should be as cold as you can get it, so let it sit in the freezer for a while before you start making your mix. For the mix: for every 500ml of liquid, you will need to add about 5g of pure agar. (Agar often comes mixed with sugar, so read the packet before you buy it. If you can only find the kind mixed with sugar, you can still used it for sweet applications, you just need to figure out how much agar is in the mix you bought. Nutritional information is useful here as you can use the protein content as a guide. It seems to be around 10% usually.)
You will also need 10 sheets of gelatin. This will give you a nicely soft yet stable pearl. You can adjust slightly higher or lower depending on your whim, but don’t go too much below 8 sheets and 4g of agar. Warm your liquid, add the agar, and bloomed gelatin (for more on gelatin, look here), and whisk well to make sure it’s disolved and well incorperated. Let this mix chill until it is about room temperature, or just starting to thicken.
Put the mix into a squeeze bottle, and slowly stream drops into your cold oil. They should form little spheres and sink to the bottom of your container. If your spheres are too large or you’re having trouble getting them to drop freely from the bottle, warm the mix up ever so slightly until it is just a bit thinner. If your mix is too warm, the pearls will take too long to set in the oil and may clump together and warm your oil up too fast. Once you’re bottle is empty, and all the pearls are at the bottom of the container, strain your oil into something that will make it easier to pour back into the bottle, I like a measuring jug. With the pearls in your strainer, rinse them really well under the coldest water you can get. Rinse them until there is no oil residue in the bottom of the sink. Keep them chilled until ready to serve.
