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 + some blackberries cut into pieces.
- Bowl 5: apple juice + 1 half-kiwi, cut into small pieces.
- bowl 6: juicepineapple (or centrifuged fresh pineapple).
Here are the instructions
- In each of the bowls, pour a level teaspoon of agar-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 trick that saves you from buying a precision scale.)
- In a saucepan, bring the contents of the first bowl to a boil.
- Pour it liquid hot in a straight-sided container, 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 little more work.)
- Proceed in the same way with the other bowls.
- Place the assembly in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
- Unmold the jellies.
- Cut regular cubes of about 1 centimeter on each side (or gently unmold the jellies taken from the ice cube moulds).
- On a plate, mount the Rubik’s cube by alternating the colors.
- Serve well chilled, accompanied by the rest of the unused fresh fruit. (It is interesting to eat fresh fruit at the same time as the gelled juice of the same fruit. Due to the change in texture, tastes seem to change too, and the whole thing delights the taste buds! Fruit jellies containing “real” pieces of fruit are very popular in Asia.)
On the science side: what’s going on?
When taking the freezethe long molecules of agar-agar unfold, cling to each other and trap the fruit juice. agar agar is particularly recommended for the fruits 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 juices. 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 moleculescalled ” enzymes », which play a key role in the life of plant cells, and which have the particularity of working like little scissors! These molecules are capable of cutting the gelatin strands even before they form the gel. By letting it boil fruit juiceswe would succeed in destroying these enzymes, but overcooking would also destroy the pigments and aromas ! Agar-agar is resistant to these enzymes. And as the links are very rigid, it even manages to trap large pieces of fresh fruit!
