Dragon Balls from Dragon Ball Z | Anime with Alvin

- [Alvin] This episode is sponsored by Bokksu. Introduce your friends to premium and authentic Japanese snacks that will be sure to stand out amongst the candy canes and chocolate boxes this holiday season. Check the link in the description. (suspenseful music) - If you want this, then come and get it! (monster gurgling and sighing) - He ate it! How could he just eat the dragon ball? (ball whooshing and bubbling) (graphics swishing) (monster grunting) (balls popping) He's gonna eat 'em all! (bal

ls swishing) (balls plopping) (suspenseful music intensifies) (balls plopping) (monster burping and sighing) (monster shouting) (graphics whooshing) - [People] Ah! (soft lo-fi music) - [Alvin] Welcome back to another episode of "Anime with Alvin." This time, we're gonna be making dragon balls from "Dragon Ball GT." Now, in the episode, dragon balls are clearly consumed, so I'm gonna use that as an excuse to make dragon balls 'cause honestly, that sounds pretty fun. Because of the mystical and po

werful nature of the dragon balls, I'm assuming that if it were to be edible, it would have to be made from pretty amazing things. So, in this little vial here, I have procured the sap of the Dracaena cinnabari, or the dragon blood tree. It is a dragon tree native to Socotra Archipelago, part of Yemen located in the Arabian Sea. It's used in dyes, medicine, and also used to be used for ritual magic and alchemy. We made sure to confirm that this was the edible version, which came in a very blank

labeled package. So, we're just gonna go ahead and use it. Now the question is, how do you make edible dragon balls? So, over here, I'm grinding down 100 grams of mastic, a resin obtained from the mastic tree, also known as The Tears of Chios. After grinding it down into a powder, we're gonna add in 50 grams of just straight up unflavored gelatin, and make sure that's all in there. This is going to go into approximately 700 grams of water until we dissolve this, and we get a nice solution that w

e can set. To be fairly honest, we're really eyeballing this year. There's no real recipe out there, so we try to make sure the ratios were correct with the gelatin and the water. The mastic and gelatin mixture is turning into a weird little foam that's kind of collecting on the surface of this water, and not really dissolving into it as I'd hoped. With the help of Rachel, we're gonna go take that aside and try again because this didn't work. Maybe the water was a little bit too hot on that one.

So, we're gonna go ahead and try this again. Grinding down 100 grams of mastic, but this time, adding in 80 grams of orange flavored jello to give that nice flavor and color to these dragon ball. This time, instead of dumping it into boiling hot water, we're gonna heat up the water first, and then dump this into a slightly smaller bowl, so that the temperature can cool down a little bit. After giving this a nice mix and admiring the hue that our water has turned into, we're gonna strain this th

rough a fine mesh sieve, because there's a little bit of chunks of mastics that I didn't grind on perfectly. Pass this once more through a cheesecloth, just to get rid of any small remaining particles, 'cause you do want our dragon balls to be shiny and perfect. Then, we're gonna drop in a couple drops of our dragon's blood sap that's gonna go in. It doesn't really smell like too much, kind of herbal, and a little bit sticky. So, we're gonna give that nice whisk, and realize that I think we shou

ld probably use an immersion blender for this scenario. So, after giving that a couple of spins and making sure that the dragon's blood is now evenly dispersed among our mixture, we're gonna divide this into six evenly spherical-shaped bowls that we got online. These are going to get filled halfway before we add our stars in. And then, we're gonna go let these rest in the fridge until they are nicely set. The dragon balls have tiny glowing stars in them from one to seven. So, I'm gonna take a re

d bell pepper, we're gonna cut these into thin strips while taking out the flesh of the pepper. We mostly just want that one to two millimeters from the skin inwards, 'cause we'd want this to stay as solid red as possible. None of that inner fleshy stuff, probably use the leftovers for fried rice or something. We are missing one of the dragon balls, which is quite a shame, because if I just had it, I could have wished for anything in the world. 10 minutes have passed, and I've only made two. And

judging by the math of this thing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and a second batch, I'm going to need to make 42 stars. Yeah, this is a lot longer than I thought. We are going to have to reevaluate our strategy for this approach. Okay, so it seems like there is a magic shining upon us because Kendall found a tiny little star cutter for a pastry tool that was just sitting in the cabinet, so this is the exact thing we're gonna use to save me a lot of time just bending over and cutting these stars. But still

cutting out 42 of these things is a little bit more work than I anticipated. That's okay, we have our stars. Thinking back though, I'm gonna go ahead and make a backup batch, because honestly, there was a lot of mastic that was sieved out, and I'm not sure that's gonna have enough gelatin or setting agent to make this mixture set the way that I want to. So, we're gonna do a safety batch with just straight up a whole entire packet of orange jello, just like how you make it on the instructions on

the back of the box. And this is also going to get evenly dispersed among six spherical molds. I realized off camera that the mixture that we used in that first mastic batch clearly wasn't setting, because a lot of the mastic had just not been in the actual mixture. So, we're gonna go ahead and proceed with the orange jello and dragon's blood batch. I'm placing the stars down on these little half formed dragon balls. One through six, and after that, placing the lid on top then filling these up

the rest of the way with the remaining mixture that we have. And I did notice that after I poured them through, I looked at them briefly right before they went into the fridge, and it seems like the stars floated to the surface of the mold, which would not make them look very pretty. I definitely made a mistake by not pushing the stars into the actual gelatin mixture itself, so I'm gonna have to go ahead, and we'll decant all of these liquid halves back into the container, and rearrange these st

ars back into their proper form. After some pushing, some shimming, and a lot of maneuvering back and forth, we now have our dragon balls completely set with our stars placed right in the middle, pushed very deep, and the liquid halves filled to the top. These are gonna go chill in the fridge overnight. It is now day two, let's bring out these and see how they look! Oh, it seems like as I was pouring for one of these, there was a little air bubble that prevented the liquid from going down, and i

t made it seem like the mold was filled, when in fact, the mold was not filled. So, there is now half of a dragon ball missing. Oh, here's number two. Both halves of the dragon balls are still not with each other. They seem to have been clinging to their respective halves. That's okay, we're gonna go ahead and shimmy these out with the rubber spatula. Try to play some Tetris here. We now repeat the remaining process with the other four dragon balls. Yep, seems like the dragon balls that don't li

ke to be one whole entire shiny thing as I'd anticipated. But that tracks, because usually, the dragon balls are spread and split for a reason, or else they're too powerful. After unearthing all the dragon balls as best as we can, here are the dragon balls presented in a little container as I think they should be. As dragon balls are quite mystical objects, and no ordinary plate will do them justice. So, here's a little bamboo steamer basket, because it looks cooler. Not as full as I would hope

they'd be, and the stars, well, they're a little bit off 'cause I forgot to push them down in the correct form, but I'm still pretty happy with the way they look. So, this is our version of the dragon balls from "Dragon Ball GT," and an edible version that you don't actually have to swallow completely in order to get powers. Let's go ahead and take one of the fuller ones, and give it a big bite. That tastes like orange jello with a hint of herbalness, probably from the dragon's blood. But the or

ange jello actually goes surprisingly well with the red pepper. There's something about that that's just really surprisingly nice. I can feel the effects taking effect. I'm now powering up. It's getting close. Yep, it is now over 9,000, I'm ready to fight Shenron himself, goodbye everybody, instant transmission, out. Thanks again to our friends over at Bokksu for sponsoring this episode. Bokksu is a premium Japanese snack box that works at family businesses all over Japan to deliver a new theme

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all over the world, and I can't wait to see her reaction. So if you want to give the gift of authentic Japanese snacks and support our channel. click the link in the description and use my code Alvin to get $15 off your first Bokksu order. (lo-fi music intensifies)