Chocolate Mousse with Strawberry Caviar

For Christmas my best friend gave me a Molecular Gastronomy kit! How awesome!

I went to a dinner party a few months ago and I brought dessert. When deciding what to bring, I thought about also testing the kit out. I originally was going to make chocolate souffle but decided on chocolate mousse.

I used Julia Child's recipe from http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2008/05/perfect-chocola/.

Since the chocolate bars I used were 3.5 ounce each, I used one full 70% bar and made up the difference with the 85%. **

From the picture you can tell the difference in the 2 different types of chocolate.

Strawberry Caviar
1/2 + 1/8 cup of water (5/8cup)**
1 packet of Sodium Alginate (2g)
Strawberries
Sugar to taste

4 cups of water
1 packet of Calcium Lactate (5g)

 **since I did not want to make a bunch of caviar and it was my first attempt, I decided to halve the recipe.

In a medium sized bowl or measuring cup mix the sodium alginate and water. I used a hand mixer and the whisk attachment since I did not have an immersion blender. (The dvd containing the recipes and video used an immersion blender.) It'll take a while for the sodium alginate to dissolve.

Pour the mixture in to a small saucepan and heat until boiling. Transfer to bowl to cool for 10 min. (I just poured in back into the Pyrex measuring cup I used to dissolve it.)

You can see that the volume decreased a bit


Blend the strawberries. You will need enough strawberry juice to equal the volume of the sodium alginate syrup.

Mix an equal volume of the strawberry juice (pass it through a strainer to remove the seeds) with the cooled sodium alginate.

Mix the 4 cups of water with one packed of calcium lactate. This dissolves easily so a mixer is not needed.

Using a syringe or pipet, add drops of the strawberry solution into the calcium lactate water. It will take some practice. I tried both the syringe and the pipet and my caviar had tails. I also tried dropping from different heights. In the end, I think the strawberry juice was closer to a puree and that made perfectly spherical caviar difficult. Once in a while I would get a perfectly round one.

Fishing (haha) out the caviar with the little slotted spoon provided in the kit is close to impossible. It is important to not let the caviar sit in the calcium lactate solution too long otherwise the inside will be a solid instead of liquid. I decided to use a strained to retrieve the caviar. I poured the solution of calcium lactate and the caviar into a strainer that was in another large bowl.

I also rinsed them in another bowl of water. My caviar look perfectly round despite them having tails when they were first made.

The finished product:

**The second time I followed this chocolate mousse recipe, I halved it and used this chocolate:

The result was fantastic. I highly recommend it. I want to test it with raspberry chocolate. The only (small) downside of using this chocolate is that it has a few almond slivers (very few).