Spherification

Spherification is the culinary process of shaping a liquid into spheres which visually and texturally resemble caviar. The technique was originally discovered by Unilever in the 1950s (Potter 2010, p. 305) and brought to the modernist cuisine by the creative team at elBulli under the direction of executive chef Ferran Adrià.

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What is Sloe ?

Sloes are the fruit of blackthorn and are actually a wild type of plum. The flavour of the fruit is bitter, so the small plums are not suitable for eating. The bitter flavour is lost when making Sloe gin & liqueurs.Traditionally folk would pierce each sloe with a thorn from the bush in preparation, or use multiple needles embedded in a cork to speed up this process but I'm a great advocate of the shortcut and sticking the fruit in a freezer not only mellows the bitter flavour (simulating the "pick after first frost" tradition) but causes the juice in the fruit cells to expand and burst the cell walls.

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How to Taste Water ?

Nestlé Waters invited four distinguished tasters – three sommeliers and an expert tea taster, whose palates are renowned the world over.

Guests were Andreas Larsson, a Swedish sommelier, nominated best sommelier in the world in 2007; George Lepré, former sommelier in Le Grand Véfour and the Ritz hotels in Paris before directing the Professional Studies programme at the Academy of Wine in Paris; Jérémy Moreau, a young Franco-American, former sommelier at the Jules Verne restaurant in Paris and wine consultant for the New York-based wine business, Winebow Inc.; and Yu Hui Tseng, Taiwanese in origin and the only female in the world’s top ten best known “Masters of Tea.” Master Tseng’s tea house in Paris offers 1,200 varieties of the must refined teas.

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