Guava Noodles

Both of us are planning on going into science-related fields and we both, obviously, love cooking, so the spherification technique seemed like a fun idea. For some reason, we spent an exceptional amount of time thinking about it and not a lot of time actually getting the supplies to do it. The stars were apparently aligned the other day, because we finally made the leap to order the sodium alginate and calcium lactate gluconate which are required for the spherification process. We also went to a local surplus store and picked up some droppers, a syringe, six feet of tubing, and a bunch of squeezy-tubes. The syringe and tubing turned out to be immediately useful. The squeezy-tubes? Not so much - but I'm sure we'll stumble upon a way to use them soon enough.

I almost feel like I've been leading you on with that first paragraph since we didn't even use the spherification stuff for the guava noodles. What happened was we mixed the alginate and calcium into their separate fluids (we were trying Goldschlager) and decided to make something else molecular gastronomy-ish while we waited for the bubbles to come out of the alginate mix. As you may have gleaned from the title, we used the tubing to make noodles out of the guava-pineapple juice we had just bought. We didn't really taste the pineapple, so we're just saying guava noodles.

Our handy hydrocolloid of choice was agar-agar. It was the powdered sort, picked up from a local Asian supermarket awhile back for barely over a dollar. Take that, absurdly expensive brand at the co-op. We used slightly over a percent of the agar-agar in with the guava juice and brought it to a boil. After letting it cool for a little bit, I sucked some up with the syringe, stuck the syringe into the tubing, and filled it up. Then, I deposited the rest of the liquid back into the pot we were using and filled it with air to push the noodle out with.

We ran the tubing through an ice bath in order to have it solidify faster, but from our experience, it can really go both ways. It's pretty much dependent on timing. The first one worked very well and came out without a problem, barring a few breaks in the noodle. The next one must've sat for too long, because it became near impossible to get out. When the air escapes the rubber stopper-thing in the syringe before even budging the noodle, there's definitely a problem. Fortunately, exchanging the ice bath for a quick dip in hot water remedied this and the rest of the noodles came out perfectly. Not only did they taste like guava, they were hilarious to slurp up. Since the noodles were so thin, we didn't really experience the issue that tends to keep us away from agar-agar: the texture.

All in all, I would say making guava noodles was a definite success! If you happen to have some juice, agar, a syringe, tubing, and maybe a scale, try it!

(Also, if you're just starting spherification, don't try it with Goldschlager. We don't know what caused it to fail, but it failed spectacularly.)

For those interested, creme brulee is surprisingly successful while using agar. We used the leftover agar-guava mixture and poured it into a shallow ramekin, allowed the mixture to solify, then sprinkled the top with sugar and flamed the hell out of it. We were surprised to find that the combined textures were extremely pleasant.