Trying out some molecular mixology

A tall glass brims over with a colourful, frothy substance. At the bottom there’s a layer of what looks like orange caviar. “It’s a cocktail you can eat,” says Lakhan Jethani from behind the bar counter.

So, we start ‘eating’ the drink, using a long silver spoon. We dig deep to make sure some of the caviar is on the spoon too.
It turns out to be quite a mouthful. First the froth hits us with one flavour after another. There is the tangy acidity of lime, slightly moderated by the bitter taste of beer, followed by the sweetness of blue Curacao. And finally, the caviar dissolves on our tongues, leaving behind a fruity flavour of peach and apricot.

Welcome to the world of ‘molecular mixology’. Here, Jethani’s bar doubles up as his laboratory, where he mixes alcohol with liquid nitrogen, alginates and chlorides to create foams and gels to add texture and unusual flavours to drinks.

Named iBar, rather predictably, Jethani has hundreds of palm-sized nitrogen cylinders in a cabinet below the bar, while another cabinet holds varieties of yeasts. “The yeasts function like baking soda,” he explains. Each one of them does something different to the drink: lightening or thickening the mixture, adding extra foam, making it more concentrated or coating it.

Now he proceeds to show us how it’s done. First, he whips up a calcium bath, a clear mixture of yeast and water, and a peach and apricot mixture along with the yeast, lemon juice, ice and soda. When this peach-apricot mix is slowly dropped into the calcium bath, the small caviar globules emerge. The caviar is then strained out.

In a shot glass, Jethani pours vanilla vodka and adds the peach-apricot caviar to it. The shot glass is then placed on a plate drizzled with strawberry and peach-apricot juice and surrounded by two spoons of caviar. ‘Plating’ is a big part of haute cuisine.

The vodka shot hits our throat with a strong vanilla flavour and then comes the slightly sweet caviar, which is the perfect follow-up. Jethani then proceeds to give us a taste of two foams, beer lime and coconut, which are used as toppings to ‘coat’ drinks.

To make the foam, the mixture — in this case beer and lime- is put in a canister, one end of which fitted with a nitrogen oxide tank. “The nitrogen oxide adds the fizz,” says Jethani.

On request, Jethani then dishes up a ‘girly drink’ — blue Curacao foam made with lime juice, ice, soda, water and sugar syrup and served with orange vodka and lemon juice. “If a pure spirit is used as the base, the foam tends to dissolve. So we neutralise it with lemon juice,” he explains.

Jethani has been wanting to experiment with Bailey and Kahlua, but is willing to wait till the market is ready for it, because they are expensive liqueurs.

Till then, there are other experiments like the Joey cheesecake (yes, the Joey from Friends sitcom), made with vanilla vodka, cranberry juice and a vanilla and cinnamon foam.

Molecular mixology has a wide range, from something interesting to something revolutionary.