Red Wine Caviar with Agar-Agar: Molecular Gastronomy at Home

A few weeks ago, El País Semanal featured dishes made with red wine. Among them, part of one recipe was red wine caviar, which I found interesting because of its curious method.

Red wine caviar

Ingredients

• 250 ml red wine
• 1 g agar-agar

Method

Cook the wine until it reduces, add the agar-agar, strain and skim.

Put the wine in a syringe.

Prepare a bowl with water and ice, and place a smaller bowl of sunflower oil inside it — the aim is for the oil to be cold.

Let drops fall from the syringe into the sunflower oil, meanwhile stirring with the other hand to create a whirlpool in the oil, so that small caviar-like pearls form. Remove the pearls (the red wine caviar) with a sieve and drain them on kitchen paper.

So we have our caviar — what can we use it for? In the El País recipe, it was part of a dish with foie gras and piquillo peppers.

In my view, it should go well with any meat, for example a pork loin; in that case we could use Port instead of red wine for more sweetness. It also occurs to me that it could look good on top of a vegetable cream soup. Or with pears in wine, where the wine is "caviarised" — new word alert!

In the end, it's a fun touch for a dish.

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