Up your bartending game with new ingredients that can transform flavours, textures, and applications of foods and liquids you already use.

Bartenders are always on the lookout for new ingredients to use in drinks and garnishes. Rather than an interesting fruit or exotic spice, however, components like enzymes, emulsifiers, and koji can bring a fresh new take on ingredients you already have on hand.

The Cocktail Balance is excited to announce that we have partnered with Töufood to offer ingredients that will up your bartending game. Now available in The Cocktail Balance shop are products that will enable you to use ingredients you know in new ways. We chose Toufood because of their high standard of excellence, and dedication to bringing innovation to gastronomy.

As we develop and release recipes with the products, they will be added to this page.

The Töufood products are in the following categories: enzymes, emulsifiers, gelifiers, salts and acids, sugars, polyols, freeze-dried, ovo-dairy, thickeners and starches, and miscellaneous. Let’s get into what each of these categories means.

Enzymes

Enzymes are naturally occurring proteins that speed up chemical reactions. Each type of enzyme works as a catalyst only for a certain substrate. Any time you see a word ending in -ase, that is an enzyme.

The Cocktail Balance carries seven different types of Töufood enzymes: amylase, cellulase, glucosidase, naringinase, invertase, pectinase, and lipase.

Amylase breaks down starches into dextrins and sugars, resulting in a sweeter taste.
Glucosidase further breaks down dextrins into simple sugars, thus working well in conjunction with amylase. Learn more about how amylase and glucosidase work here.
Cellulase is a group of enzymes that break down plant cell walls, resulting in softer or liquid fruit and veg without cooking them, and increasing juice output.
Pectinase speeds up the breakdown of pectin, one of the main components that make up the cell wall of fruit and veg, thus softening or liquifying plant material. Learn more about how pectinase and cellulase work here.
Invertase breaks down sucrose, regular table sugar, into its constituents of glucose and fructose, which taste sweeter separately than when combined. Learn more about how invertase works here.
Lipase breaks down fat, releasing aroma, texture, and taste.
Naringinase breaks down naringin, which is responsible for bitterness. With bitterness negated, other flavours normally overpowered by bitterness are allowed to shine. Learn more about naringinase here.

Salts and Acids

Salts and acids affect the flavour and structure of foods and liquids. We carry eight kinds.

Ascorbic acid, aka vitamin C, can be used to prevent browning on fruit, vegetables and even meat.
Cälcic is involved in making gelled spheres out of liquid.
Citric acid powder has long been used for an acidic taste, preservation, reduced browning, and optimal gelling.
Citrate, trisodium citrate powder, reduces the acidity of liquids.
Glucocal is a mix of calciums for spherification of liquids.
Malic acid, found in sour fruits and vegetables, is used for its acidity and stabilisation properties.
Tartaric acid powder, made especially from grapes, helps preserve food, enhances flavour and stabilises colour. Cream of tartar is the potassium salt from tartaric acid. Think of fruit-flavoured sour candies.
EFFERVËSCENT is a mix of citric acid and baking soda that, when added to liquid, bubbles up, and can be used to add bubbles to drink.

Sugars

We are all engineered to desire the taste of sweet! Choose from five kinds of sugar in the shop.

Dextrose is a sugar obtained from corn starch, used to prevent crystallisation in sweets and even ice crystals in frozen preparations.
Glucose powder is another sweetener derived from corn starch which helps thicken, stabilise, and preserve food, as well as keep it from crystallising.
Invert sugar is a syrup made up of glucose and fructose that keeps foods from crystallising and retains a high level of moisture.
Lactose is the sugar found in milk; with a mild flavour and low sweetness, often used to reduce the sweetness of the recipe without changing the amount of solids.
Trehalose powder has a high level of moisture absorption, thus keeping crunchy things crunchy and spongy things spongy, maintaining its structure.

Polyols

Low-calorie sugar substitutes. Two types of polyols are in the shop.

Isomalt is obtained from sucrose and has a sweetening power of about 50% compared to sugar. It is highly stable in humid environments and at high temperatures. It is also easy to manipulate to make candy figures and confectionery decorations.
Erythritol is a calorie free sweetener fermented from glucose. Unlike other polyols, it does not cause digestive issues when consumed in high proportions.

Lyofeeling

Freeze-dried foods, easy access for haute cuisine. We chose three kinds to offer.

Crüney - dehydrated honey crystals, for that honey taste and aroma without extra liquid
Mücilage - the white part of the cocoa bean, freeze-dried, to add a floral acidity to your creations
Sweet corn - freeze-dried whole corn

Emulsifiers

Emulsifiers stabilise liquids in mixtures that naturally separate (like oil and water). The Cocktail Balance has two kinds.

Coldföam stabilises whipped and cold siphon foams, and can simply be added to cold liquids.
Lecithin, made from soy, is both an emulsifier and foaming agent, especially good at making “airs”.

Gelifiers

Products that add texture to a food by forming a gel, of varying consistencies and temperatures. Both the gelifiers we offer are vegan.

Agar powder, extracted from red algae, is a vegan friendly gelling agent, mixed in cold and then heated to form a hard gel. Careful - it does lose some of its power in acidic or alcoholic mediums.
Alginate - sodium alginate powder, made from brown algae, is a gelling agent in the presence of calcium, as well as thickening and stabilising. The resulting gel is thermostable.

Ovo-dairy

Products made from eggs or dairy. Obviously. We have one of both.

Albumin Egg Powder is an emulsifier, foaming agent, and protein stabilizer. Chicken egg whites are pasteurised and then spray dried, resulting in a high protein/low carb powder that helps obtain stable spongy textures.
Yödry is high-protein low-fat spray-dried yoghourt powder for adding yoghourt flavour to any edible preparations.

Thickeners and starches

Xanthum gum thickens liquids whether cold or hot, with an elastic structure. It is also suitable for emulsion stabilisation, gas retention, and suspending solids in liquid.
Kuzu powder is the starch made from the root of the Asian plant of the same name. It offers a wide range of textures. It can be mixed in cold or hot, and then heated.

Miscellaneous

Black dye is charcoal made from coconut shells, which is added to foods and drinks for a vegan black colour with no additional taste.
Koji Rice is sake grade pearl rice steamed with Aspergillus Oryzae and then dehydrated. Koji has traditionally been used to make miso, amazake, sake, and soya sauce, and is currently taking the gastronomy world by storm as new applications are constantly being thought of, especially using local ingredients in processes once only used in Japan, such as pea-so (miso made with dry peas instead of soy), and transforming food waste.
Toöls is a set of modernist cuisine tools - a syringe, stainless steel measuring spoons, and a slotted spoon for spherification.

Introducing Töufood products