What's the purpose of the xanthan gum?

Char_Mayer_30435

We made spheres with strawberry juice starting with a recipe from somewhere else.

250 g strawberry juice

10 g sugar

5 g calcium lactate gluconate

Then picked up the procedure from the beet spheres and stored them in more strawberry juice.

2 of 12 fell apart. I'm wondering if I needed to add the xanthan gum? What's it's purpose in the beet recipe?

Thanks!

Char

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Comments

lfmichaud

Xanthan gum is to thicken your strawberry juice so it´s viscous enough when you drop it in the alginate bath. One way to do it otherwise would be to freeze the juice before putting it in a warm alginate bath. Thinner liquids will be a little bit more fragile so be carefull.

Take this answer with a grain of salt since I didn't take the spherification course yet! ;-)

Char_Mayer_30435

We actually did freeze the liquid like we did in the beet juice recipe...

Char_Mayer_30435

It sounds like the xanthan gum has nothing to do with the integrity of the sphere and that it's sole purpose is to thicken the liquid. Maybe the spheres that failed just needed to be in the alginate bath a few seconds longer?

Brendan_Lee_56950

When you say they failed, what exactly happened? Did they not form spheres and spread out or did they not solidify enough?

Char_Mayer_30435

They disintegrated - all the liquid in the center of the sphere leaked out. They were fine through the baths & rinsing and didn't seem to be leaking but were gone when we went to serve them.