Recipes

Imagine being able to make sweeter, creamier tasting
smoothies without adding any additional sugar or fat, or
creating the sweetest of sorbets purely from frozen fruit.
There is a magical part of blending that can make all
that possible: the particle size of the blended ingredients.
Particle size is critical in how we perceive not just the
texture, but also the taste of food. The way our tastebuds
perceive salt, sugar, creaminess, fattiness, and aftertaste
of the same ingredients, changes when we alter a food’s
particle size.
In a lab, particle size is measured in microns, where
1 micron is a millionth of a metre. In food terms, when
making chocolate for instance, confectioners try to
ensure that each chocolate particle is less than 25 microns.
Above that, the particles are detectable to the tongue,
and the chocolate just doesn’t taste as creamy.
Yet in every day cooking, I tend to find that some recipes
focus more on the taste combinations of the individual
ingredients, rather than on their final texture, even though
the texture can be every bit as important to how we
perceive taste.
Just to demonstrate the impact that particle size can have,
here’s a simple experiment you can easily do in your own
home. Compare a blind taste test of granulated white
sugar against the experience of tasting pure icing sugar
(with no added starch). Granulated white sugar is grainy
at first, and has a lot less initial taste than icing sugar. As it
dissolves it forms a heavier, caramel kind of aftertaste.
The flavour of icing sugar explodes on the tongue
immediately, tasting sharper, sweeter and thinner. But they
are exactly the same thing, it’s just that one is ground finer
than the other. So this is texture that is impacting the flavour.
Granulated white sugar has a particle size of about 500
microns, meaning each particle is easily detectable to
the tongue. Pure icing sugar (or confectioner’s sugar) is
exactly the same chemical structure, that’s been ground
and sifted to an average particle size of around
10 microns. That’s about 50 times smaller than regular
sugar. And we perceive the same ingredient as two
completely different things, purely because of a change in
its particle size.
The same thing happens to the taste of many foods.
Blenders were designed to mix an array of ingredients
into smaller particles, but just like sugar, how small those
particles become has a huge difference on the taste and
texture of the finished product. And when it comes to
blending, for most things, the finer the result the better.
The Boss
™ pulverises virtually any combination of
ingredients to create a noticeably smoother mouthfeel,
no matter what the recipe. The combination of so much
power with a blade system that can produce such fine
particles opens up a new world of recipe opportunities
not thought possible in a blender until now. From green
smoothies to hot soup, from sorbets to hummus, and from
nut butter to flour, Sage has put together a creative and
tantalising mix of recipes, along with some useful insights
into ingredients and how to get the most out of them.
Hope you like them as much as I do.
500 microns
Single sugar grain
How texture influences taste.
By Heston Blumenthal
10 microns
Icing sugar grains
6