combinatorial flavors

I'm imagining a food that comes in tiny morsels. Each one is a burst of flavor, and that's it. But the flavor is unpredictable, mysterious and absolutely unique. The act of eating one involves a sense of anticipation, surprise/confusion/delight/disgust/nostalgia/etc, an attempt to analyze the rapidly fading flavor into its components, and then, once it is gone, perhaps a sense of loss, knowing that this exact flavor will never come again. And maybe a compulsion to eat another one to make up for it...

The source for this idea in my head comes from a dim memory of a family car trip years ago where we listened to an audiobook of the arthur c. clarke novel prelude to foundation. There's a scene that I either heard or imagined as I slept in which the main character eats a delicacy much like this- it's a biological phenomenon, a plant, maybe a berry, that has thousands of distinct genes that contribute to flavors, and which recombine such that each individual is unique.

I also have been thinking about why I like kinder eggs so much- they are chocolate eggs with a tiny toy inside, but it could be any one of a huge changing catalog of toys. I guess it's just an addictive little surprise.

So I plan to order to sodium alginate, in order to make something like fruit caviar, tiny gel spheres holding a fruit puree mixture. Rather than fruit, I'd like to try various mixtures of spices and extracts and whatever else I can think of, make small batches of each them. Someday maybe I can collaborate with somebody from a biology lab, who has some sort of automatic pipetting machine, which we can program to randomly combine small amounts of any of a few hundred flavorants into an endless stream of tiny pearls each with its own totally unique flavor...

UPDATE: I got my spherification powders, from willpowder.net (there are probably cheaper places to order it from) and did some experiments. It works! Lots of fun. We made tiny clear bubbles full of almond extract, that burst in your mouth and marble shaped blobs of banana puree, flavorless until you squish them open between your tongue and the roof of your mouth. We also made instant coffee flavored ones which were bitter and horrible, and blueberry jelly ones which didn't hold together. Actually our first experiment was unintentionally very interested- I wish I had taken pictures. We mixed together almond extract, some organic red food coloring, and the alginate mix. I think it was the extract that was oil based, so mixing them together actually resulted in a suspension of droplets of red food coloring. When this was dropped out of a syringe into the calcium chloride bath, we got small pearls that were clear except for the tiny red droplets of food coloring floating inside. They were kind of lovely- it would be interesting to experiment more with this visual effect.