Posted by RF at 10:16pm Jul 17 '13it went pretty good overall. been wanting to try this out for a while now, and finally got around to it. i decided to do a roast red pepper puree as a garnish/flavor contrast for a cream of zucchini soup.
the soup was shallots and fennel sauteed then i added the zucchini, water and spices and pressure cooked for 1/2 hour. then i pureed it.
the peppers were roasted, skinned, pureed and then i added a bit of salt and a splash of blasamic (heh, looks kinda like blaspemic) vinegar.
the spherification process itself went basically fine, it formed a skin as it was supposed to. the only problem was that the puree was a bit too thick to align itself into nice spheres, so i got blobs instead of spheres. the density also led them to sink instead of floating on the surface as i had envisioned. (to get them to appear on the surface for the pic i had to add a ton of em til they piled up to the surface.)
another problem was that while they looked nice, they were too small and kinda got lost in the soup taste-wise. it wasnt quite the burst of flavor i envisioned. the puree tasted fantastic on its own, but the tiny spheres got lost in the soup. also, my back was killing me from bending over to drip the puree into the alginate bath. sometimes being 6'5" isnt a good thing. (especially in the kitchen...)
im going to try it again tomorrow night, ive still got the leftovers. im thinking to lighten the puree by adding a bit of olive oil to it. that should help em float a bit more since oil is much lighter than water. it should compensate for the dense pepper. also, im going to make them a bit bigger, like maybe 3x as big, so that theyre a bit more noticeable flavor-wise.
