Lab Coat Cooking: Mozzarella Balloon

Lab Coat Cooking Episode 1. Discover how to have fun with cheese. Surprise your friends with this new spin on a classic Caprese Salad.

You know how to have fun with cheese? I do. This is a balloon made of cheese, no really, it’s made of cheese. I’m going to show you how to do it and then we’re going to add it to our Caprese salad. Today we’re going to show you what happens when you combine the art of cooking with the smarts of science, a little thing called molecular gastronomy; and then we’re going to have fun with cheese, we’re going to make a Caprese salad and put it a little bit of different twist. You need fresh tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, garlic, roasted garlic, extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. What we want to do is slice some of this fresh mozzarella and then I want to put the rest of it in some hot water, they need to go real soft, real pliable and we’re going to make a balloon out of it. I’m going to take a little bit of roasted garlic and I want to put it on whipped cream dispenser. What part is that? It’s this, its a little miniature cartridge of nitrous oxide. The canister is filled with nitrous oxide or laughing gas; at room temperature it is a non-flammable gas used in surgery for anesthesia, car racing as an oxidizer, and in cooking as a gas for items like whipped creams. I want this nice, roasted garlic smell in my final product, you smell that, did that smell good? So here’s our fresh mozzarella, it’s hot, that consistency of bubble gum when I need to firm it and then I’m going to put it over this whipped cream canister, I’m going to hold it tightly so that makes the seal and slowly inflate it. Well you go ahead and start building the rest of the salad, ripe tomato, just going to shingle, fresh mozzarella and the tomato. On top of that we’re going to put a little bit of finely sliced basil, few little garlic slivers, some extra virgin olive oil over that, little fresh pepper and little bit of kosher salt. We’re going to set the balloon here, now all that nice roasted garlic smell is inside of that balloon. That’s why when your guest go to cut this open, they get whopped with the roasted garlic smell which is kind of nice when you’re doing a salad like this. And then I’m going to drizzle it with the balsamic syrup, what you really need about this is that, you know, it’s a typical crazy salad, but now we’ve got this new element here, with the mozzarella in a balloon. People are not going to know what it is when they get it, then when they cut in to they would like, oh, it’s cheese, you know. Delicious taste, these are quantifiable certainty when you use Lab Coat cooking.