Prepare six bowls
- Bowl 1: coconut milk + 1 or 2 tablespoons of sugar if necessary.
- Bowl 2: juice Strawberry + 2 or 3 fresh strawberries cut into small pieces.
- Bowl 3: juice mango + flesh of passion fruit.
- Bowl 4: juice grape + a few blackberries cut into pieces.
- Bowl 5: apple juice + 1 half a kiwi cut into small pieces.
- Bowl 6: juicepineapple (or fresh centrifuged pineapple).
Here are the instructions
- In each of the bowls, pour a level teaspoonful of agar and mix well. (Without scale: one gram of agar-agar corresponds to a small level teaspoonful. Just fill the spoon andlevel gently the surface to remove the excess. A tip that saves you the trouble of buying a precision scale.)
- In a saucepan, bring the contents of the first bowl to a boil.
- Pour the liquid hot in a container with straight edges, or in cube ice cube trays. (Pretty fruit salad: you can boil the juice with the agar agar, then stir in the diced fruit only when the liquid is lukewarm. They will stay prettier and lose less flavor, but it’s a bit more job.)
- Proceed in the same way with the other bowls.
- Place the assembly in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
- Unmould the jellies.
- Cut regular cubes of about 1 cm per side (or delicately unmold the jellies taken in the ice cube molds).
- On a plate, assemble the Rubik’s cube by alternating colors.
- Serve chilled, along with the rest of the unused fresh fruit. (It is beneficial to eat fresh fruit at the same time as the jellied juice of the same fruits. Due to the change in texture, tastes seem to change too, and the whole delight the taste buds! Fruit jellies containing “real” pieces of fruit are popular in Asia.)
On the science side: what’s going on?
When taking the gel, the long ones molecules agar-agar unfold, cling to each other and trap the fruit juice. Agar-agar is particularly recommended for the fruits that we have chosen here. Indeed, if we had replaced it with gelatin, the gelation would have worked with coconut milk and strawberry juice, but not with the juices of Kiwi or pineapple that would have remained liquid. And the mango-passion fruit mixture would have been too soft to handle!
Kiwi, pineapple, mango and passion fruit contain molecules, called ” enzymes », Which play a key role in the life of plant cells, and which have the particularity of functioning like little scissors! These molecules are able to cut the gelatin strands even before they form the gel. By letting it boil fruit juices, we would destroy these enzymes, but overcooking would also destroy the pigments and aromas ! Agar-agar is resistant to these enzymes. And since the connections are very rigid, it even manages to trap large pieces of fresh fruit!
.
fs7