1821 replies to this topic

[lstrelau]

I am making this today - I am in Calgary, elevation 1000 metres so 600 metres lower than Denver - see it that makes any difference.

Forgot to buy citric acid so ground up some Vitamin C tablets - there are some fillers in it so that could cause me problems. Also using 1/2 pint jars rather than 1 pint ones since I
a) only want to make enough for 6 people as a palate cleanser
b) plan to serve it straight out of the jars at table.

I have the VP112 Vacmaster so I can try the exterior method as well as inside the chamber

Will report back

[KennethT]

I am making this today - I am in Calgary, elevation 1000 metres so 600 metres lower than Denver - see it that makes any difference.

Forgot to buy citric acid so ground up some Vitamin C tablets - there are some fillers in it so that could cause me problems. Also using 1/2 pint jars rather than 1 pint ones since I
a) only want to make enough for 6 people as a palate cleanser
b) plan to serve it straight out of the jars at table.

I have the VP112 Vacmaster so I can try the exterior method as well as inside the chamber

Will report back

I think Vitamin C tablets are ascorbic acid - which is very different from citric acid... Works great as an anti-oxidant to keep purees from browning, but I don't think it'll work as an emulsifier... plus, mangos have tons of vit. c built in, right?

[KennethT]

OK - so I'm almost finished with the prep for the party tonight... whew! I can't report too much on the results yet, as most of it is still in bags in the refrigerator... waiting... I did try a piece of the chorizo french toast, which was awesome. Also, I made the Flourless Gnocchi - haven't tried it yet but I can comment on the procedure. Blooming the gelatin in teh recommended amount of cream is challenging - there's so much gelatin compared to the cream (1:2 ratio, roughly) that I felt I needed to add a bit more cream to get it to fully hydrate. It then says to melt and let cool... I let it cool on the countertop - not in the refrigerator - and when it got to room temp, it was a solid block. So I put the bowl over a really low burner to warm slightly - just enough to melt the gelatin again and added to the riced potato. The potato/gelatin/TG "dough" is quite wet - I didn't even try to mold it into shape by itself. Instead, I rolled it into a snake in a piece of plastic wrap - maki style, and then let it cure in the refrigerator that way, rather than precut as the book instructs... tonight, I'll cut the snake into pieces and fry.

Edited by KennethT, 23 April 2011 - 10:07 AM.

[Dave the Cook]

Ok, so I thought I'd give this a go. I've got a molecular gastronomy kit that I'd been given as a present last year which I thought had the right stuff to use here. I say thought as now I've tried it I'm not sure if something might be wrong!

The carageenan isn't labelled as iota, just vaguely says "carageenans". Also, dumb question time, is citric acid the same as sodium citrate? I hope so because that's what I used. For the cheese I tried a combination of cheddar and pecorino. The mixture is currently cooling but it's really grainy and tastes pretty salty, any ideas which of the various things I might have messed up is likely to be the key here?

I've successfully melted straight cheddar into liquid (beer)using only sodium citrate. The citric acid is probably the source of your grainyness. I don't know if a higher quantity would help.

I believe carrageenans control emulsification / gelling, and the different types (iota or kappa) set differently. I would speculate that kappa sets more firmly than iota based on its use in cheese slices and higher utilization in more firmly set gels. Your generic carrageenans are probably not causing grainyness. Someone up thread used kappa carrageenan for mac & cheese and reported success.

HTH,

Larry

Larry is correct -- citric acid isn't the same thing as sodium citrate; ask table salt if it would be just fine without that sodium atom! And yes, kappa carrageenan sets more firmly.

Dry pecorino is also a "non-melting" cheese.

MC notes that when using low-moisture (defined as less than 41%) non-melting cheeses, you should limit them to no more than 30% of the cheese by weight, and add 10% more liquid.

[roygon]

Has anyone tried making Pommes Pont-Neuf on 3-323? I find the scalings as is do not have enough water to even cover the potatoes. I made the Russet potatoes scaling at 67% instead of 100% and that seemed much butter. Second issue is that it says to boil them for 20 minutes and it notes that they should be nearly falling apart. After 12 minutes my potatoes are completely falling apart and almost impossible to remove from the pot in whole pieces with many of them breaking apart into nothing... I chucked my first batch and am now going to try boiling for about 9 or 10 minutes.

rg

[LoftyNotions]

Hopefully this post will demonstrate the value of Modernist Cuisine’s approach of example recipes along with best bets parametric recipes. I liked the idea of a trompe l'oeil dish and the Sunny-side Up “Eggs” recipe looked like it fit the bill perfectly. The only problem was, I didn’t have several of the ingredients and supplies necessary to pull it off.

The whites in the recipe called for gums I didn’t have, but looking in the best bets table for cold gels it looked like I could use kappa and iota carrageenan to make a cold gel for the whites.

I was also missing the molds necessary to freeze the yolk mixture in, but what the heck, yolks are round, why not try reverse spherification? And as long as I’m playing I might as well make the yolks out of mango. Worst case I waste a can of coconut milk, a couple mangos and some time. Heck, I have a blender. I can always make a faux egg smoothie.

Since I wanted to do this for a group my wife was hosting I decided to do a trial run, which is why the pictures below are from 2 different sessions.

This was my first stab at the whites. I let the mixture cool a little too long and it was setting as I dished it out. I did pour on to cold plates. If I had known better at the time, or really cared, since this was just a trial, I could have re-heated the mix and had a smooth pour.





The yolks were standard reverse spherification technique. I tried a 10 percent sugar solution for the setting bath and the yolks floated which didn’t hurt anything. My second try (not pictured) I didn’t use sugar and the yolks sank. That worked fine also.





The first time I put the eggs together I placed the yolks on top of the whites. They did have a tendency to slide off.



For my second try I poured the whites while they were warmer, onto cold plates. I also did a 2 pass pour. I also found a cutter about the size of the yolks to remove some white so they’d sit down and stay put better.






All in all, a fun project that was wery well received.

Larry

[johnder]

Has anyone tried making Pommes Pont-Neuf on 3-323? I find the scalings as is do not have enough water to even cover the potatoes. I made the Russet potatoes scaling at 67% instead of 100% and that seemed much butter. Second issue is that it says to boil them for 20 minutes and it notes that they should be nearly falling apart. After 12 minutes my potatoes are completely falling apart and almost impossible to remove from the pot in whole pieces with many of them breaking apart into nothing... I chucked my first batch and am now going to try boiling for about 9 or 10 minutes.

rg

I haven't but that was next on my list.

The only correction I see in their errata list is:

On pages 3·323 and 6·160, the recipe for Pommes PontNeuf should call for 0.75 g of baking soda with a scaling
of 0.15%.

[roygon]

Has anyone tried making Pommes Pont-Neuf on 3-323? I find the scalings as is do not have enough water to even cover the potatoes. I made the Russet potatoes scaling at 67% instead of 100% and that seemed much butter. Second issue is that it says to boil them for 20 minutes and it notes that they should be nearly falling apart. After 12 minutes my potatoes are completely falling apart and almost impossible to remove from the pot in whole pieces with many of them breaking apart into nothing... I chucked my first batch and am now going to try boiling for about 9 or 10 minutes.

rg

I haven't but that was next on my list.

The only correction I see in their errata list is:

On pages 3·323 and 6·160, the recipe for Pommes PontNeuf should call for 0.75 g of baking soda with a scaling
of 0.15%.

Yeah I noticed that when I did the math when scaling and then checked the change list and saw it. The magic number for me was taking the potatoes out after 6 minutes in the boiling water (not 20 as the book advises) since this is when they got to the point that they were nearly falling apart and these ended up being easily the best french fries I've made. Exactly as they say, very crispy on the outside even when left out for 10-15 minutes and nice and fluffy on the inside. To recap, the changes I made were 1) setting the potato scaling to 67% to ensure that the water covered them completely and 2) boil them for 6 minutes instead of 20. Like I mentioned before, even after 12 minutes on the first batch the potatoes were turning to mush and proved very difficult to remove from the pot.

rg

Edited by roygon, 23 April 2011 - 02:39 PM.

[nickrey]

The Pommes Pont-Neuf recipe is in essence Heston Blumenthal's triple cooked chips. When I make those, I use water to cover and a heavy simmer rather than a rolling boil, which is likely to produce too much agitation and break up the chips. I then take them out when they look appropriately cooked, and cool/dry them in my refrigerator as I do not have a chamber vacuum sealer. These work very well.

[lstrelau]

Well, my aerated mango sorbet worked out about the same as the previous poster - one of them did exactly what the book said, filled up the jar to the top, stayed that way and was still aerated and frozen 5 hours later. Of the other 5 jars would expand and then deflate when the vacuum released, even though the lids were sealed. Or they would expand and only patially deflate. Or they wouldn't expand at all.

I was not entirely scientific in the 'experiment' and will try it again soon. I assumed the citric acid was to make the sorbet more tart (as in using lemon juice) to counteract the sweetness of the mango/simple syrup rather than performing a more technical role. The ascorbic acid did add a bit of that tartness.

Frustrating that the results were inconsistent. Perhaps my chamber vac doesn't pull enough vacuum or I did something else wrong. Onward & upward.

[mcdiarmid]

I made the Bacon chips last night. They were pretty easy. You mix up a syrup using maple syrup, water, sorbitol, isomalt and Glucose Syrup DE 40. I couldn't find any of that (well I could, but didn't need 5kg of it) so I went with light corn syrup.

After that you let the bacon sit in the syrup for 2 hours then dehydrate it at 140 for 12 hours.

Can anyone explain the particular rationale for the sorbitol, isomalt, and glucose syrup in the bacon chip recipe (the 5-220 version, not the apple butterscotch version)? MC doesn't explain in that particular recipe. I am guessing that the sugar alcohols are being used as humectants and not for their sweetener properties since there is syrup in the recipe already. Has anyone made them with just syrup and compared them to the MC version? Ideas would be appreciated.

[nathanm]

Anyone calculate the "sweet spot" of their broiler, per pages 2-22 and 2-23?

I just did, and there's a few issues.

First off, the rods in my electric oven are not evenly spaced; the element consists of 3 U-shaped rods, making 6 straight rods, and the middle one is slightly bigger than the 2 on each side, so my rods range from about 4.5 cm from each other to about 6.5 cm.

That gives me a "sweet spot" that ranges from about 2.5 cm - 3.25 cm from the rods. That's an inch to an inch and a quarter for us metric-challenged people.

That's a LOT closer to the element than I've been broiling at. I'm not even sure if I'm steady-handed enough to get something like a pizza in the oven if I've only got an inch to do it in. And it's confounded by the fact that the element is set in a metal support that hangs down about a quarter inch below the elements.

In order to really broil in the sweet spot, I'd almost have to come up with some sort of system to raise and lower the rack so that I could put the food on the rack, then raise it to the right level. Hmmm.....

The quoted formula is where you will get the greatest degree of evenness, however it is intense enough that this does not mean you necessarily need to cook there. If it is awkward, then cook farther away.

Also, if your rods are not evenly spaced there is not much that you can do to make it perfectly even anyway, so cook where you think it will work best.

Putting aluminum foil mirrors at the sides of the area where you broil will help evenness.

A commercial electric broiler (aka salamander) usually has the rods ride in a housing which can be raised or lowered

[nathanm]

I was curious about the broiler rule of thumb when I read it too. The thing that I couldn’t understand was how the distance from the heating rods to the top of the oven was not a variable. I modeled the system myself and found that under my assumptions* this distance mattered. I also couldn’t come up with a good explanation for the 44% of spacing plus 5mm rule.

...

Now if we account for reflection from the top of the oven, things change a bit. Now we get more infrared hitting the food in between the rods but less directly below them due the shading effect MC describes. This is shown in the following graph, which models a reflective oven top 3cm above the rods.

So what does all this tell us about the so-called sweet spot? First of all, as MC tells us, we can’t put the food too close or we get big spikes that will burn the food before it cooks in other areas. The top few curves clearly demonstrate this. But even these curves show shade effects directly below the rods. There are also second-order shade effects where the reflected heat from one rod is shaded by an adjacent rod, but they are smaller and I did not model them. Further from the rods, the curves are smoother and flatter, but still have the shade effects on the order of 15%. The good news is they are quite narrow, so you can cut the effects in half simply by sliding your food to the left or right a couple of centimeters halfway through the cooking. Do this three or four times during the cooking, always in the same direction, and the shade effect should be effectively eliminated.

I'd love to hear how the MC rule of thumb was derived and what assumptions were made. Also happy to hear feedback on my results.

---
*My assumptions are that the heating rods are long enough and the food is sufficiently far from the end that their infrared radiation can be modeled by a 1/r rule and that the top of the oven is completely reflective in the infrared part of the spectrum.

----------------------------
My calculations were done with a full 3D model using (1/r)^2 fall off. Your results should be valid near the center of very large grill - i.e. where the rods are very long. In my case I did the calculation at the centerline, but took into account the finite size of the broiler directly. I also modeled dirtier reflectors (85% reflectivity not 100%).

Yes, the distance between the rods and the reflectors matters, but not very much.

The way I derived the rule is that I did the calculations for literally thousands of different grill configurations and then plotted them up. To my suprise there was a pretty simple correlation which is the rule that we discuss in the text.

Note that this depends on rod diameter as well, but most broilers are fairly similar. Sometimes they use a coil of fairly fine wire instead of a thick rod, but those are quite similar.

Please note that this is just a rule of thumb. Real examples have lots of unique differences - one post above mentions unevenly spaced rods. My own Sodir broiler has a shiny back plate on one side and open on the other three - that changes things there. Putting up your own aluminum foil coller around a dish improves eveness by reflection - that makes a bigger difference than being at the exact sweet spot with respect to rod shading.

Rod shading is one effect, but the fall off near the edge is in general a much bigger effect - that is why the aluminum collar is a good idea.

The sweet spot will by necessity be at a place where the broiler is VERY intense. It's at the point where the reflected light from the top is just about as bright as the light from the rod itself, which puts it very near the rods. So even though this is where things are the most even, you may not be comfortable cooking at that intensity level. As another post mentions, your broiler may make it awkward to actually broil that close, or to see what you are doing. Visual inspection is important with a broiler, so cooking in a matter where you can't see what you are doing may be more even, but nonetheless is harder to do.

I think that the main point here is to alert people to the fact that broilers are not very even in their heat. The fall off at the sides is substantial (unless you have shiny walls, or the aluminum foil coller). Also, it is counterintuitive, but the rods actually do shade the food, giving rise to the funny peaks you found.

Here is a graph of absolute intensity for a 4 bar grill (like my Sodir). Only half of the grill is shown, because it is symmetric around the center. Distance from center is in meters - I probably should have normalized it also, but didn't.



Each line shows the cooking intensity at a different distance from the rods.

If we care about even heating rather than the absolute amount of heat, then we can compare them by normalizing to the center intensity. That gives us this graph.



You can see the bumps, the shading and the edge effects. If you want no more than 10% difference from center to edge then look at the bands between 1.0 and .9 intensity.

The "most even" cooking distance is shown here as the purple line that stays very close to 1.0 intensity, but eventually falls off and hits the 0.9 intensity curve much further to the right than then dense pack of lines below it. It is within 10% of center intensity almost to the point below the outermost rod. The dense pack of lines is only within 10% of being even to just past the center between the two rods - and they are 20% down from the center at the same point where the most even cooking distance is only down by 10%.

Most people broil in the region shown by the dense pack of lines. It is not as even from center to edge, but the intensity is lower, and other practical considerations like being able to watch the food, are more important than the actual radiative intensity.

[sigma]

For the life of me I cannot find the recipe for mushroom stock, which is referenced several times in the book. Help?

[Anna N]

For the life of me I cannot find the recipe for mushroom stock, which is referenced several times in the book. Help?

You may have to go with the "vegetable" stock in Best Bet for Stocks on page 6 of KM or mushroom broth on page 19.

[David A. Goldfarb]

Ranhofer recommends mushroom essence frequently in _The Epicurean_-basically mushrooms boiled briefly in stock and allowed to steep until cool.

[johnder]

Mental note, when making baked beans, don't add any Calcium Chloride to it. It makes the beans seem uncooked even though they are soft inside. I read in the book that adding 1g of CaCl2 per 100g of water will firm up beans and prevent them from splitting, so I decided to play around with it.

It did indeed make a firm bean, not the texture you want in baked beans, but I can see it working in other applications.

[vice]

I made the parametric recipe for shellfish stock using shrimp heads and shells, with a few major changes: 1) I omitted the fennel bulb and leek because I was too lazy to go to the store, and 2) simmered the stock in a pot instead of cooking it sous vide. I guess that makes it distinctly un-modernist, but it was definitively delicious. The ratios are spot on.

[Chris Hennes]

For the life of me I cannot find the recipe for mushroom stock, which is referenced several times in the book. Help?

I believe it is a mushroom broth rather than a mushroom stock: is that what you mean? That's on page 19 of the kitchen manual.

[Msk]

Made the Chili Oil over the weekend, but with different Chilis since thats what I had. Very interesting and deep flavor, intoxicating. Would go great on almost anything.

Just as an update to the Mango Sorbet, I have had limited success making this with other fruits. I have tried adding Xanthan Gum, I even tried adding some Fruit preserves. Almost every time as it reaches the top of the jar, it collapses, sometimes all the way down, sometimes less. The mango is by far the most stable.

The best luck I had was raspberries, with some added seedless rapsberry preserves, and some xanthan.

Mike

Edited by Msk, 25 April 2011 - 06:27 AM.

[emannths]

Re: citric acid vs. sodium citrate. Citric acid is just hydrogen citrate, and since it's the citrate ion that's doing the emulsifying legwork, they should both help emulsify the cheese. The problem is that citric acid is acidic (duh) and sodium citrate is basic, so your pH will be off. The pH definitely affects carrageenan's gelling qualities, and it may affect the emulsifying properties of the caseins in the cheese as well. Also, acids tend to prevent cheeses from melting by increasing the interactions between the caseins.

If you can, measure the pH of your cheese. If it's below ~5.4 or so, increasing the pH may help.

There's almost infinite more info about processed cheese in this scientific review article.

[Chris Hennes]

After listening to Amirault's raving about the pastrami up-topic of course I had to make some. Having no access to decent beef cheeks (let alone Wagyu), and similarly no good short ribs available the week I wanted to make it, I just went with brisket. I used point, but I don't care for the large wedge of fat running between the two muscles, so I butchered it to remove that vein. What I wound up with where three pieces of brisket that were each more or less the thickness of a beef cheek, or perhaps just a little thicker. So I cured for four days (rather than the three suggested for cheek or the seven suggested for brisket): I'm not sure if this mattered in the end or not. I also left the dry rub on when serving because I really loved the flavor. I have to agree with Amirault's judgement here: holy pastrami. This is the stuff dreams are made of.



(yah, I reheated that in the microwave... even so, it was fantastic)

[vengroff]

The way I derived the rule is that I did the calculations for literally thousands of different grill configurations and then plotted them up. To my suprise there was a pretty simple correlation which is the rule that we discuss in the text.

Thanks, Nathan.

It surprises me too, but sometimes linear regression works well even in places you don't expect it to.

[Carlton]

After listening to Amirault's raving about the pastrami up-topic of course I had to make some. Having no access to decent beef cheeks (let alone Wagyu), and similarly no good short ribs available the week I wanted to make it, I just went with brisket. I used point, but I don't care for the large wedge of fat running between the two muscles, so I butchered it to remove that vein. What I wound up with where three pieces of brisket that were each more or less the thickness of a beef cheek, or perhaps just a little thicker. So I cured for four days (rather than the three suggested for cheek or the seven suggested for brisket): I'm not sure if this mattered in the end or not. I also left the dry rub on when serving because I really loved the flavor. I have to agree with Amirault's judgement here: holy pastrami. This is the stuff dreams are made of.



(yah, I reheated that in the microwave... even so, it was fantastic)

Oh that just looks too good. I'm just waiting on the Insta Cure I ordered to come in so I can make some myself. Since Insta Cure seems to be hard to source locally around Los Angeles, does anyone know if you can just make your own? I think it's 6.25% sodium nitrite and 63.75% sodium chloride.

[Sharif]

Also, dumb question time, is citric acid the same as sodium citrate?

Not the same, but you can use it to make sodium citrate. It's basically a matter of adding baking soda, water and heat.

The reaction is: C6H8O7(aq) + 3NaHCO3(s) -> 3H2O(l) + 3CO2(g) + Na3C6H5O7(aq)

Basically, to get 100g of trisodium citrate:

• Dissolve 74.45g anhydrous* citric acid in distilled water. You'll probably need around 125 mL of water to fully dissolve it (more is fine, but it'll take longer to boil off).
• Add 97.66g sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) slowly. It will produce a fair amount of carbon dioxide (about 2 soda siphon chargers worth). Citric acid+baking soda+water is the reaction behind many fizzy bath bombs.
• Boil off the water; what remains is sodium citrate. This can be done in a 175C/350F oven (though it should be possible to use higher temperatures as sodium citrate is apparently stable below about 300C/575F). Breaking it up periodically while it's solidifying seems to help the result end up closer to a powder.

* If you don't know if your citric acid is anhydrous (for what it's worth, my unlabeled citric acid was), you can convert it to anhydrous with heat. Wikipedia says this occurs above 78C (and citric acid decomposes at 175C) so baking it for an hour or so at 135C/275F should probably convert whatever you started with to anhydrous citric acid (which is weakly hygroscopic so it's probably best to keep it in a sealed container).

If you know you have the monohydrate variety, you can measure out 81.43g of it instead. Or if you don't want to bother, you could just use 74.45g of whatever citric acid you have and stop adding baking soda when it stops foaming (somewhere between 89.29 and 97.66 grams) or when the pH is neutral/slightly basic.

I ran this by a chemist friend of mine and he said a quick and dirty method would be to add baking soda saturated water to solid citric acid until it fully dissolves and stops bubbling (might have some overshoot, but you can add more acid to fix this). He pointed out that distilled water is useful because citrate will preferentially bind to Ca2+ over Na2+ if there is calcium present in the water, though slight impurities probably aren't a big deal. Lastly, he mentioned it should be possible to avoid making the sodium citrate beforehand (i.e., add the citric acid and baking soda in the cheese recipe, which is more or less what emannths suggests).

- Sharif

[jmolinari]

Oh that just looks too good. I'm just waiting on the Insta Cure I ordered to come in so I can make some myself. Since Insta Cure seems to be hard to source locally around Los Angeles, does anyone know if you can just make your own? I think it's 6.25% sodium nitrite and 63.75% sodium chloride.

i wouldn't. In instacure the nitrite is bound to the salt so the distribution stays even throughout the bag. If you just put the 2 chemicals together you're likely to have stratification or improper distribution.
Spend the $10 and mail order it.

[RDaneel]

I made the carmelized carrot soup on Sunday, and it lived up to the hype. The faint aroma of browned butter filled the kitchen, which was nice, even if it meant that precious volatiles were wasted during pressure cooking! The pureed carmelized carrots were so good on their own (though rich), that I could see serving it as an amuse-bouche on porcelain spoons. I don't have a juicer, so I had to go with carrot juice from Whole Foods, but it seemed fine. The final soup was decadent, pure, and silky. I found minced fresh sage to be a perfect addition, though my guests tended to find it a bit overpowering. Personally, I think the sage gave great variation to those mouthfuls that included it, and recommend it as a garnish...

Another great success for a "not too modernist" MC recipe.

[Phaz]

I did another batch of the mango sorbet and learned a few things. I thought I'd post it here for people to capitalize on.

First, my jars just barely fit inside the VP-112. In fact, it was too snug. I could put the lid down and have them in a sweet spot where the lid wouldn't be touching the jar. However, once the vacuum started, the lid of the VP-112 would push down on the lid of the jar, sealing it, and preventing the vacuum from pulling any air out of the jars. This was the result of my jars that didn't 'fluff' up at all.

My first work around from this was to put the jars in on their side, with the lid screwed down a bit (so the expanding mango wouldn't leak through the side). The problem with these versions is that they would sometimes collapse before they were done. Basically a few bubbles would get big and pop, which would cause others to pop, which would cause a reaction and soon it was nearly the volume I started with.

The fix for that problem was to manually stop the vacuum a bit sooner, or add a little more mango to the jar. You'd see it drop a little in volume a few times and from there had just a few seconds before total collapse (it makes sense when you try it).

The other problem here is that when the air was reintroduced to the chamber, the lid would seal on the jar, but not before letting some air in, which would reduce the foam by 50% or so.

The next thing I tried was my jar attachment. This had the same problems as above. Sometimes the seal would be pushed down too much and it would vacuum at all, sometimes it would collapse, sometimes it would go through and foam up well but extra air would collapse it some right before sealing.

I'm still working on a solution. I'm thinking maybe that universal lid that is used in an above post might work better for the last sealing step and not introduce air because of how it works (maybe) since it seems you leave it on the jar and don't use a standard lid. Maybe I can get a few of them and use them with my big jars (4 pint) to do large batches all at once. My only worry here is that with jars that big the mango won't have enough time to reach all the way up. I was doing it for the full 60 seconds the machine allows in the pint jars and sometimes that would just barely be enough time to get it done all the way to the top. I'm not sure how well this scales.

My other idea is to put the jars inside bags, with the lids screwed down (but not fully tight) and then putting them in the VP-112 on their side. Then letting them fully inflate and manually stopping them just before I think they are going to collapse. The hope here is that then when it reaches that point, the bag will then seal before any air is let back in. That will mean that there isn't any extra air inside the jar that can be forced into the jar collapsing things. I'm not sure if cutting the bag open after it's all done will let air in or not (depends on how well the jar seals with only outside air pressure through the bag) but I figure I can just throw the whole thing into the freezer and wait till it freezes and stabilizes before I have to worry about that.

The good thing about this recipe is that the base amount in the book gives you a LOT of jars to play with. I certainly needed all those extra attempts.

Also, I think for trying other fruits the process won't be that bad. As I found above, most my issues were caused by the sealing of the jars themselves. I think for testing fruits it's easy just to put some of it in an open jar, without a lid, and see if you can get it to foam up. I'm confident that if you can, the process will work if you can get it sealed properly.

I think someone (Nathan?) said it was the pectin that makes mangoes a good choice. I also thought I remember someone saying the citric acid helps in reacting with the pectin. I'm wondering if just using strawberries (or whatever) and citric acid and adding some pectin manually will let the same effect work. It should be easy enough to experiment with since you can remove the jar sealing from that step and just add ingredients as necessary to work on ratios.

[Msk]

Phaz, I was following Nathan's suggestion of using Xanthan, perhaps I just didn't use enough. I decided to add some jelly of the same flavor fruit puree to add pectin content since I don't have Pectin on hand, again maybe there wasn't enough pectin in the jelly. Oh I did the above attempt without any citric acid at all. (the first successful one with pictures) So thats not even needed with mango.

You may have hit on a point too about the universal lid pulling a different type of vacuum, I haven't gone back to using that since I bought the smaller Ball Jars. I made a batch of the Simple syrup so maybe Ill give it another go tonight with some other fruits.

The other question is, if just adding Pectin is the answer, does it have to be heated to get hydrated? Most jelly recipes include it for canning which means its always heated.

Mike

[lstrelau]

Phaz, your thought that the release of vacuum in the VP112 is allowing a bit of air in before the jar can seal makes sense although I still can't figure out why one of my jars worked absolutely perfectly, filled right up and stayed that way and why others only partially filled and others wouldn't even start to rise. More experimentation necessary for sure. Since I scaled the recipe down by a large degree I didn't have as much to play with. I did use 1/2 pint jam jars instead of 1 pint jars which fit in the chamber just fine. I figured the end resultant quantity would be fine for service directly from the jar as individual servings (even though there was only 20 grams of mango base in the jar it 'looks' like a large portion to the diner).

Doing a test with other fruits, as you suggest, makes sense too. I did add some pureed frozen saskatoon berries to the remainder of my test batch of mango and while it did expand satisfactorily, the fruit the fruit-to-seed ratio in Saskatoons (service berry) made for a not so pleasant eating experience.

Will try the jar in a bag idea and also with the one small container that was made for vacuum sealing - if a person could find a source for inexpensive or semi-bulk purchase of these canisters it could be good for individual service. Another thing to try would be putting a jar (would probably need to be the 1/2 pint size with its lid and snug ring) inside the external vacuum canister and then repeat with additional jars.

The eating experience of the aerated sorbet was quite nice, especially as it just starts to soften enough to make it easy to spoon out and before it 'melts'.