Popping Boba - Reverse spherification giant popping boba
How to make a giant popping boba that bursts juice in your mouth? This recipe teaches us how to use the reverse spherification technique to make a snow-globe-like popping boba with a floating filling.
Equipment
- Kitchen scale (with at least 1/10th of a gram precision)
- Sphere Ice Mold with Lid
- blender (optional)
- Food thermometer (optional)
Ingredients
- 6 small strawberries (For the floating filling, you can also use edible flowers, cranberries, orange pulps, pomegranate pulps, or anything else that's colorful and can float.)
- 6 g calcium lactate (See Note 1)
- 600 g Sprite (See Note 2)
- 5 g sodium alginate
- 1 liter clean water
Instructions
- Place fruits or edible flowers of your choice into the sphere ice mold. (Do not overfill the ice mold. In each tray, I'd put only 1 small strawberry, or 3 edible sakura flowers, or other fruits in similar size of a small strawberry. You can add some sweet fermented rice or edible glitter to make the popping boba look prettier, like a snow globe.)
- Add 6g calcium lactate and 600g juice of your choice (I used Sprite)to a large bowl, whisk until fully dissolved. Pour the calcium lactate solution into the bottom piece of the ice cube tray, snap the top part on, then pour or inject the rest of the solution through the hole on the top until each ice cube tray is full.
- Keep the sphere ice mold in the freezer for at least 4 hours (or overnight) until the solution is solid.
- Add 5g sodium alginate and 1 liter of clean water to a blender. Blend on high speed until the sodium alginate is fully dissolved. (You can also whisk by hand. But the sodium alginate could be hard to dissolve. You may need to keep whisking for about 10 minutes.)
- Pour the sodium alginate solution into a pot, warm it up to about 70°C/158°F. (You can use a food thermometer, or tell the water temperature by observing: Once tiny bubbles start to form on the bottom of the pot, the water is around 70°C/158°F.)
- Turn off the heat, pour the warm sodium alginate solution to a large cup. Gently drop a calcium lactate ice ball into the warm solution. Let the ice ball sit, uninterrupted in the warm bath, for about 5 minutes or until the ice is completely thawed. (At the beginning, the ice ball will float on the surface. You don't need to press it into the water. It will gradually be submerged under the water as it gets thawed.)
- Use a slotted spoon to transfer the popping boba to a serving plate.
Video
Notes
Note 1: I said "calcium chloride" in the video, that was a slip of the tongue! I actually used calcium lactate for this recipe.
Both calcium lactate and calcium chloride are often used with sodium alginate for making popping boba. The difference is that calcium lactate has a neutral taste, while calcium chloride tastes salty and bitter.
Therefore, calcium chloride can only be used to make the setting bath to activate the sodium alginate, as what we did in this strawberry popping boba recipe. When using calcium chloride in basic spherification, we need to rinse off the setting bath to get rid off the salty taste after the popping boba is made.
Calcium lactate can be used for reverse spherification. In this giant popping boba recipe, we will dissolve the calcium lactate into juice and consume it. Therefore, calcium lactate, who has a better taste, would be a better choice than calcium chloride.
Note 2: You can use any type of juice to make giant popping bobas, as long as the juice is transparent. For example, you can use Sprite, green tea, lemonade, fruit juice, or alcoholic drink.
If you really want to make coke, coffee, or milk flavor popping boba, that's also fine. But you won't be able to see the fruit or flower filling floating inside the popping boba, because these drinks' colors are too dark.
If you choose to use carbonated drink (I used Sprite), make sure you decarbonate it before freezing it into ice balls.
To decarbonate a fizzy drink, you can pour the soda into a pot and warm it up (no need to boil), keep stirring until the soda becomes flat.