My first attempt at making tomato-agar pasta went well, but I made a note of some of the things I wanted to change the next time around. The pasta broke easily, so increasing the % of agar was a must. I also didn’t end up with a large amount of pasta, and what I did end up with was very viscous (difficult to pick up in the syringe, leading to air bubbles and therefore breaks in the pasta strands), so I fixed this by adding water to the strained tomato soup. I also wanted to make the dish slightly more interesting, so I decided to create a dish of tomato-agar pasta combined with arugula-agar pasta.
I started with the arugula pasta this time. I was more laissez faire with the amounts this time around as I was getting more comfortable with eying up the necessary textures and consistencies. I added handfuls of arugula and water to a blender, and blended them until they were as fine a paste as I could make them. I added salt to season the pasta, and ran the mixture through a sieve. I added 2g of agar to this fine mixture, heated it while stirring, and ended up with an arugula-agar mixture of 150 mL.
With 150 mL of the arugula-agar mixture, I was ready to go. The next step was to full up a syringe with the mixture, inject it into the PVC tubes, immerse them in cold water for ~3 minutes, and use an air-filled syringe to eject the noodles.
While I was doing this, I got the tomato-agar mixture ready. I did this by straining tomato soup, and adding water and agar to the mixture while heating.
I ended up with about 100 mL of the tomato-agar mixture, and began to make tomato-agar noodles when I was done with the arugula noodles.
I continued this until I had a plate full of arugula and tomato agar pasta. I grated fresh mozzarella and fresh pepper over the plate, and voila! An amazing plate of pasta consisting purely of tomato and arugula.
Leave a Reply