Edible Fake UV Glow in the Dark Caviar

They glow in the dark in blacklight but don't contain any fish! These caviar balls are surely one of my favourite glow food recipes as to date, because you can use them as decoration on many other foods. In this DIY video I will show you how I made them!

The UV glow caviar is white in normal light, but glows blue in blacklight (ultraviolet light). The ingredient that makes them glow is the quinine in Tonic, which is UV reactive. 

The name caviar in this recipe is used in molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomy is a subdiscipline of food science that tries to investigate the physical and chemical transformations of ingredients that occur in cooking. Spherification is the culinary process of shaping a liquid into spheres which visually and texturally resemble roe. You also need agar agar powder for this recipe, a pipette, and cold vegetable oil.

After cooking the ingredients (as you can see in the video) and when the mix has cooled off a bit, you use a pipette to drop it in cold vegetable oil (store in fridge first). Spherification will follow.

Here you can see what the glow caviar looks like when it's dropped in vegetable oil in the dark, in blacklight. Most vegetable oils are slightly UV reactive, which is it glows slightly yellow/green in blacklight. The caviar glows blue.

After spherification you need to strain the caviar from the oil. I used a fine mesh strainer for this.

When you have separated the caviar from the oil, you need to rinse it with water. You can hold the fine mesh strainer with the caviar in it underneath a stream of water for a while, or drop it in a bowl of water (and strain afterwards again). After this you allow the caviar to dry for a while on a piece of kitchen paper for example.

Here you can see the final result.

You can use the glow caviar as topping for a variety of foods. Cupcakes for example! Here I switched the Tonic in the original recipe with vitamin B2 (Riboflavin) which glows yellow in blacklight. I mixed it with blue icing colours to make it green.

Using vitamin B2 alone as the main ingredients turns your caviar yellow. In this cupcake recipe I made yellow toppings with it. Doesn't it look magical?