Rhubarb, Seven Different Textures, Pt. 3

I wrote this last night, Wed Sept. 15th.

I pureed the lavender gel this morning to make lavender pudding. I’ve done this trick of mixing a liquid with agar, setting it, and blending it several times now. Each time I find it very hard to get a perfectly smooth gel; it seems to want to come out grainy:

The pudding and poaching liquid are, as I suspected they might be, bitter. I know this is from compressing the flowers a bit after steeping to try to get more liquid from them. I strongly suspect this component isn’t correct in the book; there’s just too much lavender being used I think. I emailed the Alinea Mosaic with a question about this, but haven’t gotten a response yet.

Kris brought my juicer back this morning, so I went through and juiced everything I needed to. It’s amusing to me that this recipe demands a juicer more than any other so far, so this was silly timing on my part. But, I got everything juiced and refrigerated, which I think is a safe holding pattern for the next few days until I make use of each liquid.

This entire recipe, I’m learning, is poorly laid out. Two recipes called for “500g rhubarb juice”, and a third calls for “1000g rhubarb, which I’m supposed to juice down to 500g rhubarb”. There’s a lot of jumping around, and zero flow to the recipe. It’s hard and very confusing. It’s also hard to make sense of how much of a particular ingredient I need total. So far I think I’ve tallied up 10 lbs of rhubarb for the entirety of this dish, though I’ll confirm that when it’s all over.

For posterity, here’s some yields:

~850g rhubarb yields about 500g juice
~850g beets yields 450g juice
~900g fennel yields about 500g juice

Rhubarb juice does this crazy separation thing when you heat it slowly. Here it’s also being mixed with some citric acid, to keep it from oxidizing and help the color stay vibrant. This is a cool trick.

The above is beet juice. Again, my iPhone can’t deal with the correct color of the juice; it’s more ruby than this bright read stuff here, and looks so dang beautiful.

Notice my exciting spelling errors at the bottom there. I was hurrying.

I also got my beet juice spheres in the freezer. I wish I’da taken a better photo of my gear laid out, to submit to the “Things Organized Neatly” blog, which is my new favorite thing in the world.