Introduction

A recent order to the Spice House (www.thespicehouse.com) had me excited.  Not only did they have some smoked paprika and powdered sumac (good on top of humus), they also had odds and ends for molecular gastronomy.   In case you don’t know what that means, it’s the hoity-toity way of saying doing a little chemistry with your food to create unusual effects.  Candy making is molecular gastronomy based around sugar and it’s behavior at certain temperatures.

One of the most notable effects from this “rockstar” chef movement is Spherification.   I’ll warn you that I’m no expert and definitely not a historian on this manner.  In fact, apart from seeing it done on Iron Chef now and then, I’ve only been served spheres in a restaurant one time and it was not even that memorable.

But I wanted to give it a try — so I bought some stuff for making balls (er….spheres).

Spice House offers excellent small-sized bottles for spherification.

As I mentioned earlier, Spice House offers small-sized amounts of Calcium Salt and Sodium Alginate.  Quantities sized right to get started, and the ingredients are food grade (so not from some scary chemistry shop where they may be tainted with ferric chloride, cyanides and other nasty not-so-edible chemicals).

Why write a post about my balls?

My stuff showed up just in time for some weekend play — but now what?   I trolled the web, but couldn’t find any straightforward explanations or recipes.  How much do I mix in?  How do I make the drops?  What are some basic tell tale signs.   Give me some range of expectations a la Good Eats so that I can tune in my spheres and get this process working.

I gave up on the internets and started playing and making my own notes.  What follows are my experiences from a weekend day of playing around with little alginate balls.

The Process

I didn’t make that much of a matrix, as I was basically trying to dial it in (and my 9 month old can only handle being ignored for so long).   The great part, though, is that I was able to use things that are readily available to any home cook.  Oh, and I took lots of notes of both the successes and the failures.

The Solutions

To make spheres, you drop one solution into the other.  Typically, the flavored ingredient is mixed with Sodium Alginate and dropped into a solution of Calcium Salt.  Through some chemical magic, drops turn into little spheres with a harder outer coating and a soft liquid gel like inside.  Properly done, the little spheres pop in your mouth like caviar and release tastiness on your palette.

Ca:Salt Solution

The Calcium Salt solution is easy to make up.  In my case, I just used room temperature tap water (our tap water is tasty good) and whisked in a small amount of Ca to dissolve.

Sodium Alginate Solution

The sodium alginate solution is a little more tricky.   For this set of experiments, I made spheres using sweet tea (thanks, Steph).  I figured it was a good basic starting point, as it is failrly neutral in acidity and we plenty of it to work with.

The problem with the alginate lies in actually mixing it together (emulsifying).   I first tried room temperature sweet tea and a whisk.   This just made clumps, which don’t work and are not good eats.

The answer: I popped the clumpy mixture into the microwave for 30 seconds and took it just shy of a boil — voila, the sodium alginate clumps broke apart and a whisk finished the job.    The resulitng liquid was fairly bubble free and slightly thicker (think maple syrup).

Another method of emulsification that I have read about and tried is to use a hand stick blender.  This is an aggressive approach and definintely worked at emulsifying the liquid.  However, it also seemed to incorporate lots of bubles and it loosened up the liquid considerably.  Using the hand blender, I needed more alginate per liquid volume in order to achieve the desired thickness.  Also count on a period of rest (or hook up your shop vac and a home made bell jar) to de-air your mixture.

The Dropping methods

Everywhere I looked online people used various tools to create the drops that create the little spheres.  You can use a toothpick or a spoon or a syringe.   As I worked with the various methods, I quickly developed opinions — which I will share with you below:

Toothpick

Good for initial testing of your solutions to see if they will sphereize.   Terrible for creating large amounts of balls — 1 ball every 5 seconds is pretty maddening.   Also ends up creating somewhat inconsistent ball sizes, depending on how much the solution clings to the toothpick.

Spoon

Very uncontrolled.  Pretty much useless for creating spheres.   You can create noodles and spermy looking shapes, however.

Here are the 3 dropping tools I attempted to use. A small eye-dropper type bottle on the left, a more expensive version on the right and a syringe front and center.

Syringe

Maybe I had a low quality syringe, or too small a syringe.  I had a devil of a time creating consistent drop after drop.  Instead, the syringe would clog now and then and I would end up spraying out some alginate solution into a rats-nest in the calcium salt.   Taking in a little air into the syringe helped a little bit with constant pressure against the alginate solution.  Either way, I was not fond of the syringe method.    The best use of the syringe was to cleanly fill up the dropper bottles.

Dropper Bottle

After getting frustrated with the syringe, I tried 2 different dropper bottles.  Both of these worked many times better than the syringe.  They created consistent sized drops and did so very very quickly.  The second dropper bottle was able to create 100’s of droplets in a minute!   A good dropper bottle is easy to fill and the nozzle won’t clog with alginate.   Too tight a nozzle and and the alginate eventually gums up the orifice and you can’t make spheres anymore.      In the end, I used a syringe to cleanly fill a dropper bottle and unleash a batch of droplets into the calcium salt solution.

Example dropper bottles that I tried:

• (dropper bottle in picture on right) VWR International:  16354-400   $80 for qty 12
• Low density VWR International 46300-592 or larger (46300-594 is 8oz),  $33 for qty 25

The other nice thing about the dropper bottles, is you can cap them and store your alginate solution for up-to-the-minute use.   One important note about spheres is to not keep them sitting around too long. After about 30 mintues or so they eventually go “stale” and harden up into solid balls — not nearly as texturally interesting as caviar-like spheres.

More Detailed Notes And Quantities

Alginate solution on the left and calcium salt solution on the right -- we're ready to make some balls.

Below are my notes on the solutions and mixes and results.  After trying to weigh out the ingredients on a precision scale, I gave up — how many of us actually have scales in our kitchen accurate enough to measure fractions of an ounce (or just a couple of grams).  In this case, volumetric measurement is going to be more reliable and more available to the standard home cook.

Sodium Alginate Solutions

Sodium Alginate was added to the room temperature sweet tea, but since it faield to dissolve, the mixture was heated in the microwave for 30s – 1 min (just shy of boiling) and whisked to emulsify.

Solution                  Sweet Tea                   Sodium Alginate

A                                   1 oz                                1/8 tsp

B                                   2 oz                                1/8 tsp

C                                   2 oz                                3/16 tsp

D                                  3 oz                                 1/4 tsp

Calcium Salt Solutions

Calcium Salt was added to cool tap water and dissolved with a whisk.

Solution                       Water                            Calcium Salt

1                                  8 oz                                 1/2 tsp

2                                  4 oz                                  1/2 tsp

3                                  8 oz                                  1/4 tsp

Results and Notes

In the following section, we’ll refer to the solutions above.   Obviously, “A1″ means sodium alginate solution “A” dropped into calcium salt solution “1″

Red food coloring and simple syrup make these early spheres visually pop off the plate.

A1 Observations

• Time in Solutions:
  • Drops 1 minute in solution were a little soft, but hardened up a little after sitting.
  • 3 minutes in solution was perfect
  • 4 minutes in solution was a little too hard
• Solution Notes:
  • Use a little less alginate, the “A” solution was noticeably thicker — almost mayonaisse.
  • Probably could use some more calcium salt since it took so long in solution
  • There was not an excessive salt flavor from the calcium.
• Syringe Notes:
  • I used the syringe + louver, and got about 3mm drops, but the syringe kept clogging
  • Once I got some air in the syringe behind the alginate solution and it helped with consistency.
• After 30 minutes of standing by, the spheres were still edible

B2 Observations

• Solutions Notes:
  • The Calcium saltwater was quite strong
  • Not enough alginate to form a ball
  • Very strong resigual Ca:Salt on spheres….must be rinsed well
• Drop does not really penetrate surface of the water to make a sphere…instead it sits on surface and additional drops glom on.

A mound of perfectly popping prismatic sweet tea spheres sits on a white plate. Super tasty and sweet!

C2 Observations

• This combination worked pretty well.
• Some balls were solid however, way more than A1 — this is not as appetizing
• Solution Notes
  • Required less soak time than A1
  • The #2 salt solution definitely needs a good rinse.
• Dropper Notes:
  • Used the dropper bottle (“methonal bottle”)   VWR International:  16354-400
  • This was great for a consistent drop size, although if the alginate solution gets too thick it can sometimes clog.
  • Used the syringe to cleanly fill the dropper bottle.   This worked really well.

D3 Observations

• Time in Solutions:
  • After 1 minute in the Ca:Salt solution, the spheres were nice and delicate with a good outer layer and  a snap when you bite into them.  Perfect mix for our sweet tea spheres.
• Solution Notes:
  • Alginate needed to heat or brought to boil for faster/easier emulsification
• The drops enter the water almost toroid shaped but did sphereize.
• Dropper Notes:
  • Tried a different dropper bottle (like a visene eye-dropper). Although a little more difficult to fill, it did NOT clog.  It also generated dozens of spheres quickly — just squeeze.
• Stayed good for 5 minutes (easily) after pulled out and rinsed and dried.

Other Notes and Findings

Drying

Drying these little buggers is in itself an art.   I tried a couple of ways, but by far the easiest was to spread them out on a paper towel in a single layer and cover with a paper towel and slowly roll the balls between the two layers.   The other method is to creeate a “sling” out of a few paper towels and kind of toss the balls around inside the sling.

Spheres, balls, everywhere. Watch out -- these guys know how to roll!

Balls Everywhere

Expect to find and lose balls everywhere.  Once loose, they roll….and because of their size and transparent quality, they can be extremely difficult to find.

Serving

Serve as a presenation note on the side.   I’ve served in leiue of sauce on top of fish (think parsley puree spheres with a good touch of salt as a high note on top of salmon).    Concentrated flavors and colors work well.

Tastes for Serving

For saucing or as a side note, think big bold flavors.  The spheres are small and you want them to pop and release bundles of joy.   I made a nice parsley sauce which, when over-salted, produced a wonderful topping for fist.   Blueberry juice is a little weak, but blueberry preserves thinned with water carries a good punch of flavor.

Other Hints

Mix up your alginate and drop all of your balls at once into the Ca:Salt.  Insead of trying to fish spheres out of the Ca:Salt, just pour the entire Ca:Salt solution out and into a strainer.

3oz of alginate solution is a LOT of spheres.   Easily enough as a side note on plates for 4 people.

I tried using a scale to measure ingredients, but this proved frustrating, as most scales simply cannot handle small fractions of an ounce (or gram) quantitiies accurately.

Debugging

If the drops sit on top and do not sphereize, then there is a likelihood that you don’ thave enough soldium alginate.   If, after a minute, the balls are still too fragile, up the calcium salt solution.

Next Steps

So what next?

Well, I’ve made some great spheres using a celery salty sauce and put this on broiled salmon – but I used the hand stick blender to emulsify the alginate and it took far more alginate than expected.   So clearly, there are some variables at play.   Perhaps I need to buy a pH meter and do some work with acidity and quantity other variables.

The metric that seems key, but is the hardest to quantitatively measure, is the viscosity of the alginate solution.  This is definitely a case where having some experience regarding what to expect and mixing it by eye may be easier.

The following rant revolves around Office 2008 for the Mac.    In the 2008 release, Office supposedly goes “native” for the x86 architecture and Aqua.   My old copy of Office 2000 was still working and running under Rosetta on 10.5, but (silly me) I felt like I needed to upgrade for improved performance when I upgraded to 10.6.

When you meet up with an an old friend after a decade, you are all the more aware of the changes they have gone through. Similarly, my switchover from Office 2000 to Office 2008 gives me an excellent “delta” comparison.  In this case, Office 2008 is like that high school 2nd string athlete who is now balding, fat, divorced and addicted to some substance or another.

So, without further ado, let’s look at Office 2008 for the Mac (under 10.6) with an eye towards its former self, Office 2000.

Suite-wide Performance

Compared to the current release of Office 2008, the apps of Office 2000 launched faster (with Rosetta) on 10.5 and 10.6 than Office 2008 does “natively”.   I wish I had hard numbers for you, but I’m simply not going to be that thorough here.

POINT:  Office 2000

Look & Feel & Tools

In Office 2008, Microsoft’s attempt at tool palettes is a miserable failure.  Not only do they manage to clutter the screen with a massive amount of junk (like clip art and shapes and a pre-formatted document style pane) they also fail in several other key ways:

1. The tool palettes fail to have the same information and capabilities as the menu system.   This simply makes it a nightmare to find a given feature (could be in the menu, could be buried in a tool palette).
2. The clutter of palettes is completely unwarranted mainly because it is features that nobody but a 3rd grader (book report with clip art) or a CEO (powerpoint with motion and sounds) would think of using.  It’s almost like they dragged users into the feature meeting, pointed out a palette and said “wouldn’t it be cool to have clip art and styles and sound palettes”.  The users said “yeah, I guess”, and the design team took this as a free ticket to put everything in your face.    Sure, one could go through the mess of turning stuff off, but “intelligent defaults” are nowhere to be found here.
3. “Tearing off” a palette is something Photoshop and Illustrator have done “forever”.  Pinning palettes to the top is also a key feature.  Reorganizing palettes to fit your workflow.  Easily adding or removing palettes.   Give it up…..not supported in Office 2008

For simplicity and less clutter,
POINT:  Office 2000

Excel 2008:  Misery

Nothing in the Office 2008 Suite has gotten as drug-addicted as Excel.   We’re talking crack-head functionality here.

First point — I couldn’t give a hoot about VBA support.  This seems to be all that people whine about in the new Excel versions (“No VBA support on the Mac!”).  Whatever, as there are even more mundane problems with this turd of an upgrade.

No text labels in charts, but you can add pictures of ducks instead

Excel 2008 now fails to properly handle and graph large amounts of data.  If you have more than 1000 datapoints, be prepared for long waits as it tries to build your graph.  Be prepared for the beachball.  Be prepared for a crash.   Most of all, be prepared to deal with Excel’s inability to graph things it could crank through in Excel 2000.

POINT:  Office 2000

Oh, and while we are on graphs, you can no longer have a graph on the sheet with data and print just the graph!  Selecting a graph and hitting print may just send 400 pages of data to your printer.  Turns out this is a “known” issue according to Microsoft from 2 years ago! You have to move the graph to another sheet to print it out by itself.   Awesome, eh?

POINT:  Office 2000

You can no longer add arbitrary text boxes to a graph (See example picture).  This was something that was easy to do in Office 2000 (and even in Office 1997). In some graphs in a workbook,  you can add clip art of a dog or a duck or a cute little doggie (who wants their Busy Bee?) but you cannot add additional information other than a title and axis labels.  For some reason, in other graphs I’m unable to even add the same pictures.   So there goes my hopes of encoding additional chart information based on the animal’s species.  WTF???   This loss of text boxes in charts is a backbreaker.    It turns out that Open Office 3.x appears to suffer the same difficulties.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT:  iWork for Mac, ’cause it is even more functional for graphing!

And finally, formatting a graph is painful at best.   In Office 2008 it is even more difficult to modify the data series data (No, Microsoft, I don’t really want to drag select my data columns when I have more than 1000 rows of data….I’d like to manually enter the series range).  Don’t even bother trying to re-arrange or re-center, as graphs tend to move around on their own.   Seriously, check out how far iWork has surpassed Office 2008 in terms of charting capabilities.  8 years ago there was no “iWork”.   Even the free Open Office matches the features and then some.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT: iWork for Mac, Open Office 3

Powerpoint 2008: Ho Hum

Powerpoint 2008 is in stasis.   Really, it improved at all in the last 8 years.   For many users, Powerpoint is their primary “draw” package, yet it is no easier to draw pictures and edit photos than it was in Office 2000.

Forget about styling your slides.  An eye Candy pre-formatted puke fest clutters the tool palette instead.   If you want to set up basic font styles based on bullet point depth you’ll have to search and work on it for quite some time.

Auto-layout and layout guides are barely implemented (see Keynote or OmniGraffle for a great example of how to do this).  At least Powerpoint 2008 can hand PNG images!

Regardless, Powerpoint is still the same boring old POS.  It has lots of clip art and other junk at the expense of a clean method for managing and creating professional looking presentations.

This one is a DRAW

Word 2008:  As nimble as a cow

Word continues to be a massively heavyweight cluster-f.  The floating palettes are equally cumbersome and still make changing fonts and adding styles a mess.   Even after 8 years, putting together a Table of Contents is something that befuddles all but the most dedicated users.   Forget about indexing!     Lost in the stone-age, Word fails to do lots of basic text editing tasks and make them easier.   As a document layout tool, it still remains painful.  Images have a habit of moving around and re-sizing themselves (or ignoring your attempt at re-sizing).   Establishing basic things like gutters and orphan control continues to be an option buried deep in the layers of menus.

POINT:  Office 2000
POINT:  TextEdit, TextWrangler, iWork, OpenOffice

Conclusion

On Mac OS 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 and even 10.6, Office 2000 is a solid upgrade to Office 2008.   In Office 2000 you will find a bevy of useful features and a fairly clean interface and relatively simple-to-use set of tools.

If, like me, you had no reason to upgrade, I strongly recommend you stick with your old copy of Office 2000.  If you must upgrade, consider the free version of Open Office, as it not matches the functionality (and then some) of Office 2000 and even Office 2008.     If you don’t mind breaking out a little bit, I would suggest iWork, as surpasses Office 2000 in terms of functionality and ease of use.

Oh, and at no point is this review being sarcastic…..Office 2008 really is that much of a step backward!

Well…. a weekend of work and I hope that the migration from static publishing software to blogging software will enable me to make more faster bettah quicker posts.  We’ll see.

Although I have tried to maintain links, I expect that some of the older posts might have broken links.   Worse, the main Reds Toyland site is definitely going to have some orphaned links that no longer can find the old reference.  Oh well — not that big a deal.

Favorites (at least what people tell me they like reading) are geting their own category.   These include the awesome My First Hospital Visit post and the Open Letter to the Diaper Changing Mom rant.

Enjoy the new site!

Today, we’ll discuss one of those less-than-obvious things about being a goalie (and player, too perhaps).

::Background::

While I have short hair, I’m currently sporting the (out-of-style) spiky look. To get said spiky look one has to use product. Not a lot, mind you, but some reasonably stiff hair gel of sorts. Continue reading Goalie Thoughts: I Has A Flavor

#1… a long time swimmer of mine (yes, I’m a part-time swim coach)….said his final goodbyes today. Having coached for nearly 15 years, I have seen swimmers grow up from 5 year-olds to college athletes. These goodbyes are both sad and happy at the same time. While it will be sad to see such a great guy head back with his family to Japan (after years in this area), it will be great for him to have traveled and experienced the world. He will surely bring his irreverant style and wonderful attitude with him. Beware Japanese coaches…..your swimmers will be “eating American bubbles” (his words). May he and I meet up again (either in Tokyo or in the states on a pool deck)!

#2… I’m switching jobs. Yup….for those of you that know me, I will be changing employers after 7.5 years at Lightwave. Bittersweet indeed. I will miss everybody there that I worked with, but am happy to depart after 3 patents, half a dozen successful laser designs (e.g., models 110, 112, 142 as seen on the web site) and too many tools and fixtures to count. Viva la Barracuda!

#3… Lightwave has been acquired by JDSUniphase. The announcement came 21st. As I leave, the company is in the throws of acquisition and “figuring things out” in order to move on to the next step as part of a larger entity. Interesting times, for sure.

Warning: This blog entry serves no purpose. That said, I woke up this morning and had some super duper ultra tasty coffee from the war-torn (can’t we just say “worn”) region of Zimbabwe. Due to political instabilities on the other side of the world, this particular version bitter brew is most likely headed towards extinction. There seem to be only 40 pounds left for me to get my hands on, so we are starting a stockpile in Steph’s fridge/freezer in hopes of making it last. Anyway, what better way to enjoy a nearly-extinct brew than with buttery pancakes and crisp thick-cut bacon. The way I figure it, heaven is having those three items in close vicinity of one another…a fork is optional.

Continue reading Random Weekend

Went to SAP open (formerly the Seibol Open) last night to watch the semifinals with Agassi and another game with Roddick. The first match (see my tennis rant) between Agassi and somebody else in a blue shirt was a sleeper. Agassi was asleep, and gave up midway through the 2nd set. It was about this time, that I noticed Mike Ricci (former San Jose Shark) and Vinnie Damphousse (former Shark as well). Those two (and their blonde wives) were far more interesting to watch than the Agassi match.

Continue reading Rubbing elbows at the SAP