Video: How to Make Carrot Juice ‘Caviar’

Wired: Gadget Lab: Maker Faire wasn’t all exploding battlebots and 300,000-volt giraffes. There were food hackers at work, too, like Michael Zbyszynksi, who explains how to make carrot caviar in this video.

He starts with a beaker of ordinary carrot juice mixed with sodium alginate — a derivative of seaweed — at a ratio of 2 grams of sodium alginate to 250 grams of carrot juice (a 0.8% solution).

He then uses a syringe to drop small beads of the solution into a bath of water with a couple grams of calcium chloride dissolved in it. The calcium chloride hardens the sodium alginate from the outside in, giving it a "skin" that holds the carrot juice inside.

After rinsing in plain water, the caviar-like beads are ready to be used as a surprising garnish. Nifty!

Video production: Annaliza Savage. Camera: John Ross. Editing: Michael Lennon. For more Wired video, see video.wired.com.