Agar Brick

I admit, this is beyond advanced home cooking, but there are a lot of situations in which you want to thicken a sauce. In molecular gastronomy, a sauce thickened with agar is called a fluid gel. Once set, agar doesn’t lose its structural integrity—it just becomes smaller and smaller bits of gel, which means you can blend agar with thin liquids like balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, or cilantro water to increase their viscosity.

The conventional approach is to add an exact ratio of agar powder to the liquid you’re trying to thicken, heating it, letting it cool and set, then blending it. That’s a good approach if you have a perfect recipe for a soy sauce fluid gel (something not hurt by heat), but not great if you’re making a cilantro fluid gel (something hurt by heat) or a balsamic fluid gel (since balsamic varies in viscocity depending on the vinegar quality). Unless you have a tested recipe, you may end up wasting a lot of time before you hit the right consistency.