Butter or flavored butters?

I'd like to try and use reverse spherification to make clarified butter or flavored clarified butter caviar, as to top a steak or different proteins with. My questions are, (1) would I need to add xanthan gum to the butter to make it thicker in order to form better spheres? (2) Would using butter require different amounts of calcium or alginate in making the baths? And, finally, (3) Would placing the spheres on top of a hot protein (I.E. a hot steak or chicken breast) cause the spheres to burst or melt away?

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Comments

grandpa.yum

why spherify butter? Why not just find a suitable mold and let melted butter solidify?

You would likely need to add something to adjust the density. Maybe taking an approach like frozen reverse spherification where you use a heated sodium bath would help as well

Tim_Roth_78505

I think you'll also run into problems with solubilizing the alginate and calcium in the butter. Clarified butter is essentially just the fat portion of butter. I'm fairly confident that you won't be able to dissolve either sodium alginate or calcium chloride/lactate/lactate-gluconate in that (and a quick google search confirms that at least one supplier agrees with me: http://www.kimica-alginate.com/alginate/how_to_use.html). As @jon_laur points out, you'd have to form solid spheres of the butter first - at which point I suppose you *could* coat the solid spheres in a fine calcium powder and dunk in an alginate bath to get the sphere and then warm them to melt the butter inside. I think I've seen this done, but I don't remember off-hand what the application was.

The spheres themselves are pretty heat stable - if you *do* manage to form spheres of clarified butter, I wouldn't worry about them bursting or melting unless the sphere itself gets punctured.

Brendan_Lee_56950

Couldn't you go with a different gel coating? Something like guar mixed with iota similar to Wylie and his carrot coconut sunny side up

Chris_Lehrich_439824

Has anyone had any luck with this? I have found that the problem is temperature: the butter instantly becomes very hard when it touches the alginate solution, and if you use a warm alginate solution, the butter ends up a strange whitish mass instead of a nice yellow ball. I have also tried dipping frozen butter balls in an agar gel solution, but it's extremely delicate and keeps breaking.

The idea is to make spheres of butter that are hot and melted--yet still spheres.