in our previous video we went over one and a grisel is some of its properties and why you may or may not want to use it in this video we're going to go over how to actually create an agar gel and some of the common pitfalls now as we talked about in our gelatin video agar is a hydrocolloid meaning that it can trap or suspend water and just like any hydrocolloid ingredient agar has a best practice for properly hydrating and incorporating into it the base liquid that you want a gel now agar itself usually comes in a white powder form and you're use for a growing to range anywhere from 0.2 percent to 0.5 percent so 0.2 percent is going to set a gel 0.5% or 1/2 percent by weight is going to set a very firm gel so again this is always going to be measured by weights you'll take the weight of your base liquid that you want to set into a gel and you'll multiply that by point zero two or excuse me point zero zero two or point zero zero five so if I had a thousand grams of a base liquid that I want to just set into a light gel using agar I would take that 1,000 grams multiply it by point zero zero two giving me point two percent by weight resulting in two grams of agar and then I would hydrate that agar into my liquid now to properly hydrate those two grams of agar into my base liquid I'm going to add the agar to my cold liquid bring this liquid to a simmer while whisking occasionally simmer for four minutes and apply some sharing power just for insurance now again sharing power is anytime you're applying a force like whisking or blending to any sort of items so here in this case well I could do a little hand mixer blenders when I bring my agar to a simmer I'd like to take a little hand mixer kind of get a little blitz for a few seconds and that's going to make sure that I don't have any Agra coming up in the mixture and just that sharing power I find helps make sure that agar is fully hydrated now once you full hydrate the agar and you give it a good blend of the hand mixer or you just pop it into a blender but be careful I actually prefer the hand mixer because a blender will incorporate a lot of air into your agar gel and that air will make it more opaque first a hand blender is just enough sharing power to make sure your agar is completely incorporated without adding additional air but once I apply that sharing power and then I'm going to pass through a strainer to make sure all particles are removed and allow to set now as we talked about in our last video the setting temperature of agar is pretty high and it sets rapidly at about 95 degrees Fahrenheit 35 degrees Celsius but the agar gel doesn't actually melt till it approaches or crosses at least 175 degrees Fahrenheit 80 degrees Celsius now one of the major pitfalls I do see when cooks are using agar is they don't properly hydrate it they bring it to a simmer but they don't simmer long enough so you want to make sure you're simmering gently at four minutes just to make sure that's fully hydrated and then hitting it with a hand mixer like I talked about it's going to make sure that the agar is properly hydrate but if your aggregate isn't setting chances are that's one of your issues now another issue with Agri gels is that it has what's called stenosis or it weeps so against the nurses or weeping basically means that a gel will leak water so you'll see that sometimes especially when you're making a terrine we have this issue when we are making our citrus terrine we would notice that when we unmolded it and let it kind of sit on a board or we could slice it overtime it was slowly weep or to leak some moisture from that gel which would affect its structural integrity and it also kind of dehydrate a little bit so we were able to solve this problem by adding point one percent locust bean gum to our total mix and we would hydrate this locust bean gum directly in to the liquid we'll talk more about in a second I'll give a little bit of a tip on how we actually make our citrus terrine so if it's not probably hydrate you're going to have issues so nurses or it weeps also too if left uncovered it will slowly dehydrate but one of the cool spec's is it will also uptake moisture in the presence of moisture or it will swell with the surrounding liquid so again in the example of the citrus terrine we would actually pre slice the citrus terrine and this would actually make it more executable because this way we didn't have to slice it to order during a busy dinner service but we have the advantage of then taking that sliced terrine and soaking it in a flavored liquid those complementary to the terrine and actually swell with that moisture and add more flavor and add more moisture to our terrine giving us a better and product now Agra doesn't have a whole lot of inhibitors like gelatin does so it can actually stand up to proteolytic enzymes it can stand a high alcohol content you can stay on to low pH one thing that agar does have an issue standing up to is tannic acid which will commonly find in teas or wine so if you're making a tea based terrine or a wine based gel you might have issues however this can be countered with the addition of glycerol now average ability to gel can be inhibited when it's heated for a prolonged period of time outside of the range of 5.5 or 8 on the pH scale however when we use the agar to set our winter citrus terrine we actually heat the agar we simmer the agar in the citrus juice which has a pH of around 3.2 and we simmer for 4 minutes to fully hydrate it and we've never had an issue with our agar settings so when I say prolonged heating outside of this pH range it means you have to really heat it for a long time I've never actually had a go not work because of this issue for me now because I've used it in numerous examples in both our gelatin and a gravy do series I'm going to go over with you real quick just the basic formulation of how we make our winter citrus terrine so the quick rundown is set the citrus Supremes and any juice that comes from the supremes at 100% multiply that by 0.1 which is going to give you 10% sugar and point 0 1 which is going to give you 1% salt and you want to add the weight of your Supremes and Juice Plus sugar and salt together to get the total weight of your ingredients for this terrine you're then going to multiply the total weight by 0.3 cent or point zero zero three which is going to give you the amount of agar that you need and multiply it by 0.1 percent or point zero zero one which is going to give you the total weight of locust bean gum that you're going to need separate the juice from the supremes and dispersed in the juice your agar and your locust bean gum and then heat the supremes to 100 degrees Fahrenheit 33 degrees C and then combine with the juice place in a terrine mold lined with plastic wrap and allow to set slice and serve so a couple of the finer points is we heat these supremes just to get them hot enough so when that juice dispersed with the agar and locust bean gum hits the supremes if they're cold through our room temperature or below then those cold supremes are going to start to set our agar gel before we are able to fully incorporate so what we'll do is we'll place the supremes in a perforated pan over a steamer because the steam is a nice gentle heat wellhe him to there about a hundred agrees for and have it basically we don't even measure this we just go by touch so once they feel warm to the touch we'll place them in a mixing bowl with our juice that has the agar agar and the locust bean gum dispersed and again the locust bean gum is there to keep our gel from weeping we'll mix them together really quick place it in a terrine mold lined with plastic wrap and then allow it to set now I hope you enjoyed our video series on agar agar I am going to do one more video contrasting agar and gelatin to see why you might want to use one of the other in a side-by-side example so stay tuned for that if you have any questions that you would like to be answered based upon food science or cooking techniques please go ahead and shoot me an email Jakob at Stella culinary calm and don't forget to sign up for our free email newsletter at Stella corner comm slash it was