Frozen Yuzu Air

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Frozen Yuzu Air

Frozen air is an incredibly light, delicate frozen dessert or palate cleanser made by freezing a lecithin foam. Yuzu juice is perfect for airs because its flavor is complex, light, and playful, complimenting their ephemeral nature.

I first discovered this technique in a chocolate frozen air recipe by Ferran & Albert Adria. It’s a little tricky, but could be considered a truly new frozen dessert experience (and a wonderful one at that).
This recipe produces only a small amount of foam (how much really depends on how successful you are at whipping and freezing it), so it’s best served as a palate cleanser. However, you could multiply the recipe multiple times to create larger quantities.

Frozen airs need to be served immediately upon coming out of the freezer (and any vessel they’re served in should be ice cold itself), because they melt extremely quickly.

INGREDIENTS
  • Special Equipment:
  • Immersion Blender (aka Stick Blender)

DIRECTIONS

1

Blend together the yuzu juice, simple syrup, and lecithin until the lecithin is completely dissolved.

2

Chill.

3

Place a cover-able container (preferably metal) in your freezer. I used a metal bowl on top of another metal bowl filled with ice.

4

Pour the mixture into a low, wide container. You want there to be a deep enough layer of liquid to cover most of the immersion blender’s blade enclosure, but need enough surface area for the foam to accumulate.

5

Take your frozen container from the freezer and ready a spoon for skimming (preferably large, wide, and fairly flat).

6

Start blending the mixture with your immersion blender, then angle the blades up just until air is being whipped into the base and a dense foam begins to form on the surface.

7

Stop blending, and skim the foam off the surface with the spoon. Gently place it in your frozen container.

8

Repeat steps 6 &7 until you’ve produced as much foam as you think you can from the base. Try to work as quickly (but gently) as possible.

The leftover base can be drunk, used as a cocktail mixer, etc. The lecithin doesn’t modify the flavor much, if at all.

9

Move the foam to the freezer. If you can cover it without crushing the foam or taking too much time, do so.

10

Freeze. If you couldn’t cover your foam, try to open the freezer door as gently and infrequently as possible while it’s in there.

11

Store small bowls for serving the air in the freezer.

12

Serve the air in the cold bowls immediately after taking it out of the freezer. Try to scoop it as gently as possible to preserve its volume.

Modifying this recipe for other flavors:

This recipe could be modified to substitute lemon juice, lime juice, grapefruit juice, a lemon-lime blend, sudachi juice or kabosu juice. However, you’d probably want to adjust the quantity of simple syrup and possibly add water.

As you change the quantity of liquid, you’ll need to change the quantity of lecithin to compensate. Try to stay as close as possible to a ratio of 1.5g of lecithin per 500g of liquid (multiply or divide the ratio to suit the amount of liquid you’re actually using, but I wouldn’t go lower than I’ve done in the above recipe).

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