Chocolate Mud Sushi with Lychee Roe

It’s a weird post title I know. But I work for a food company and a couple of weeks ago during our induction program, they brought us into the test kitchen and we got to meet one of the chefs. He talked about the trends in food and mentioned the fastest growing trend at the moment: Molecular Gastronomy. He demonstrated this by turning eggs, oil and orange juice into a light fluffy foam just by putting it into a canister, shaking it hard and letting some gas mix with it. I was fascinated!

So I did some research and stumbled onto a type of molecular gastronomy called Spherification/ sferificacion… it’s basically the controlled gelification of a liquid which, submerged in a bath (of chemicals), forms spheres. Check out this You Tube video for a better explanation.

I was so excited to try this (imagine the possibilities of making your own jelly balls!), but also nervous about having to work with the chemicals. The Red Spoon Company sells a Spherification/ sferificacion kit and I was about to buy it until I stumbled across the Sticky Fingers blog.

It talks about how to basically create the same effect without the chemicals. The only difference is that the spheres won’t resemble a sac of liquid, but instead it will be like little balls of jelly (looks the same though).

I’ve always wanted to make ‘sweet sushi’ and have always been stumped about how to make the ‘roe’ until I saw this method. So I tried it out this weekend and ta-da! I present to you, chocolate mud sushi with lychee roe.



I used juice like the recipe suggested but the jelly didn’t have any flavour after it was made, maybe because each little sphere was so small… so I think the next time I’m going to try a concentrate like a cordial mix to get a stronger flavour. I also used a dropper instead of a syringe (it was all I had available) so some of the 'roe' is a bit misshaped because the jelly started hardening as I was making it. Can't wait to try this again :)