Agar Béchamel troubleshooting

elie808

I've recently attempted a flour-less béchamel by preparing an agar fluid gel.

I've ran into several problems during that process, and hopefully I can get some pointers from the community.

After blending the gel, the fluid gel came out grainy and "dry". It didn't have that luscious viscous texture of a creamy béchamel and had a very pasty character to it, similar to clay or wet clay.

Struggling to blend the gel nicely, I mixed in some chicken stock to loosen it up a little. It did help the gel get more fluid and easier to mix with in with the pasta, but baking the pie in the oven, rendered the whole sauce totally liquid while it was still hot, and then it started setting/gelling as it cooled down !!

I've used the CS soubise fluid-gel as a starting point, substituting gellan for Agar.

Recipe:

400 g Chicken Stock

400 g Milk

200 g Cream (>35%)

150 g Onions

9 g Agar (~1%)

8 g Salt

3 g White pepper

3 g Nutmeg

I proceeded to sweat the onions, mix them with milk, stock and cream then blend everything.

Then boiled the mix and dispersed/mixed the agar.

The gel set nicely, but blending brought out all the issues.

My guesses about what went wrong;

1) Boiling cream was a bad idea, since it normally curdles and becomes grainy.

2) I did not strain the mix after blitzing the onions. Definitely didn't help.

3) Taking into account the pure water content in the milk/cream/stock, 9 g Agar happens to be a couple of grams extra the 1% I was aiming for.

4) A 1% Agar gel might have been too firm to start with.

5) Adding the stock to the fluid-gel before baking, re activated the Agar to reconfigure and re-gel.

What do you guys thing ?!

Chris_Young_80640

So agar is not a perfect substitute for gellan, particularly thermo-irreversible Kelcogel F. When you baked it, what you saw is what I would have expected: baking agar heated it above it's above it's melting point, and as it cooled to near body temperature it started to re-gel as a solid block, rather than a "fluid gel" sauce.

As for the wet-clay like texture, that does indeed sound like too much agar. I would try 0.75% next time (although you would be much happier using Kelcogel F, IME).