The Egad of Balls
- Leilani
- Sep 11, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 2, 2023
When I was in graduate school, studying something completely unrelated to writing or food, I had a friend and colleague who early on told me that his food aversion was anything and everything spherical. If you are as confused as I was back then, I completely understand. He didn’t like and literally refused to put anything in his mouth with a round shape, in other words, no peas, no couscous, no macadamia nuts. His name is Dan and I think he’s still designing architecture in Seattle. Hi Dan! Make sure you give him a holler if you know this Dan that hates balls.
And sure, maybe he’s got some inexplicable bias, he doesn’t understand molecular gastronomy, or doesn’t get that you can’t hate balls because that just means you hate yourself. But I must concur in one respect, that perfectly shaped round balls seem contrary to nature. When I look at the wild grasses growing in-between fissures of lava rock, when I hike through a trail of overgrown trees and fern plants, there is chaos. Chaos looks right and natural and edible, like melting ice cream on a warm piece of pie, or avocado haphazardly placed on toast with a soft poached egg bursting over it. The food that I like to eat is a mess. It’s a messy bowl of bun bo hue covered in a medley of herbs piled precariously high, or a confetti of salad leaves, nuts, and fresh veggies splashed with a tahini dressing . Food for instance, is not a boba ball that hits the back of my throat when I take a deep slurp from an oversized straw. One gargantuan sip from a boba drink, and the rush of four or five boba shooting into my mouth sends my brain into a state of shock as it tries to figure out - what are these perfectly shaped gummy spheres doing in my mouth? Where did they come from? Because nothing is ever that round, ever. Maybe marbles, and you know we don’t eat those.
Making spherical food, as I think back on Dan and architecture and the concept sphere by Etienne-Louis Boullée - the Cenotaph for Newton that stood 500 ft high, is an exercise in otherworldliness and awe that we don’t get with other shapes. Maybe it has to do with the Greeks and their idealized proportions of man vis a vis Vitruvius. Growing up, those feelings of awe were in Chinese banquet restaurants where fifteen course meals whizzed by me on a large lazy Susan. Spheres are shapes to be idolized, like Aristotle’s celestial sphere which places the Earth (and coincidentally us) at the center of the universe. But how a tiny boba can embody awe and fear is beyond my spiritual understanding. I should be passing this query along to AI.
Before we ask the robots for all the answers, let’s try Ferran Adrià, the father of spherification. The movement of experimental balls in molecular gastronomy harkens back to the early 2000’s in the Spanish kitchen of Adrià. His restaurant, El Bulli, had critical acclaim, with Restaurant magazine naming it the No. 1 restaurant in the world for 5 years, in which time, he turned a tomato salad into granita, created a white bean foam of sea urchin, deconstructed chicken curry into an ice cream, and made a melon caviar for dessert. This caviar, which is now commonplace in fancy restaurants across the world, is not an act of God, just a chemical reaction when liquid mixed with alginate meets calcium salts. The effect though, is awe and fear depending on one’s shattered expectations.
Adrià dared to create the tower of Babel of spheres and now his restaurant is closed. Let this be a lesson. And the knowledge he has imparted has yet to make its way successfully into mainstream restaurants. Spherification is still reserved for the Jeff Bezos’s of the world.
But I’m here to break the spherical glass ceiling and let you in on the means and methods of spherical production. You too can play God. There are two methods. In direct spherification, you take sodium alginate and mix in a low-acid flavored liquid (.05g of sodium alginate to 100g of liquid), then drop the liquid into a bath of calcium chloride and water (also .5g of calcium chloride to 100g of water). When a membrane forms, you strain and rinse in water. Reverse spherification, it is pretty much the opposite, where the flavored liquid is mixed with calcium lactate and sometimes xanthan gum, then slowly dropped into a bath of sodium alginate and rinsed.
Boba is not spherification, but it sure looks mythical. It’s tapioca starch made from the cassava root, kneaded into dough and then shaped into tiny balls. These are then boiled in water with sugar for 30 min to cook through. Boba is also made with fresh fruit purees, like mango, by mixing the juice or pulp with tapioca to make a dough and then cooking accordingly. I imagine boba can be made with any liquid flavoring for that matter – boba could start turning up in savory dishes. Chicken boba soup anyone?
The bigger question is will the sphere, and consequently other new forms of food, gain traction in the framework of mainstream cuisine? When or will we ever start eating hot dog caviar on a bun? Spherification is a little time consuming, but no more so than making a croissant from scratch. At 6 cents a gram for sodium alginate, the cost is high, but maybe if there is more demand and more suppliers, the price will drop. Boba, the low-cost gummy counterpart, has successfully infiltrated coffee and tea drinks all over the world. It’s just a matter of time that the sphere is no longer something to sphere, I mean fear. And when that happens, be ready for a plate of round mashed potatoes, round steak balls, round broccoli, polished off with a glass of round balls of wine, all the while, sitting next to your friend robot. I’m going to call it Dan.
Supplies for making Boba:
Bob’s Red Mill Tapioca Flour
Supplies for Spherification:
Modernist Pantry
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