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Edible sand

someduckfat:

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Molecular gastronomy is a dirty word these days. And it is perhaps unsurprising; there is potential for rampant wankery with these techniques. What the hell are ‘Lychee bubbles with sage air on oysters’? I am not making that last one up. I have the recipe in front of me.

But maybe every new cooking method looks pretentious. I’ll wager that the first chef to cook a souffle drew both praise and scorn. Hell, I reckon that the first caveman to cook his meat over a fire had some classicist cavemen looking down their noses at him for not eating it raw.

This was my first attempt at edible savoury sand, and it was only a partial success. The technique uses tapioca maltodextrin, a purified dried polysaccharide (ie - sugar) made from cassava root. It is much less sweet than sugar, and can absorb a great deal of oil. This is where its molecular application comes in: you can apply any type of flavoured fat and it will coat small particles of the dextrin, carrying those flavours in powder form, which then rapidly dissolve in the mouth.

The limitations, as I discovered, are firstly that it will also absorb any water, making for a sticky, glutinous and very non-sandlike mass. Also, being less sweet than sugar doesn’t mean it is not sweet at all, and its starchiness also carries into the end flavour.

The aim was to make Hot English mustard flavoured edible sand, but I was only partly successful. I firstly struggled with the texture, since I think the water content of the mustard was too high. The recipe below was an ad libbed attempt to rescue the sand by baking the water out of the mix, which worked OK in the end. I also found that the amount of maltodextrin needed diluted the punchy bite of the mustard, and the starch came to the fore. The result had a faint mustardy sweetness to it, but the dominant flavour was the starch. It tasted like powderised oven-roasted potatoes, which was actually quite interesting and pleasant.

I think this would work on its own as an accompaniment to beef served on the side. Think of it as an interesting take on a side of potatoes. It certainly looks cool. But I do want to work on the recipe and see if I can get the mustard taste stronger. Watch this space.

You can easily buy maltodextrin cheaply online. Bodybuilders use it. Dumbasses. 

Ingredients

  • 1 Tsp hot English mustard
  • 1 Tsp grapeseed or ricebran oil
  • 2-3 Tsp tapioca maltodextrin

Instructions

  1. Mix the mustard and oil well.
  2. Stir the mustard mix into the maltodextrin powder with a fork. Mix well. The mixture will clump like wet sand. 
  3. Put the clumps on an oven tray and bake at 150C for 15-20 minutes. The clumps will swell up and dry out as the steam escapes.
  4. Once hard and dried out, whizz in a blender until a fine powder forms.
  5. Run the powder and remaining clumps through a sieve, pressing with a wooden spoon to break up the larger bits. The resulting powder will have the texture of sand.

(via someduckfat)


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