paulraphael

Nonfat solids, especially sugars, have a much more pronounced effect on hardness than the fat level. Fat actually has no freezing point suppression ability at all; it only effects hardness by its whipability into a strong foam, and by how hard the fat molecules themselves crystalize. This latter question mostly becomes an issue when you have fats that harden a lot, like cocoa butter. When your ice cream only has milk and egg fat, you'll find that the fat percentage makes little difference compared to the other solids. A great way get your recipes under control is to pay attention to drawing temperature. This is the temperature of the mix when it's whipped up to the texture and overrun level you like. I keep a thermopen style thermometer by my ice cream machine and check the temperature when I think the ice cream is ready. All my recipes are designed to draw at -5°C / 23F. This is a good temp to aim for. It gives a good texture at serving temperature, gives good resistance to ice crystals growing, and guarantees consistency from one flavor to the next.

It just sounds like sugar crystalization. It's possible that the flavors causing trouble have enough naturally inverted sugar to prevent the issue. Not sure otherwise why you'd be getting it sometimes and not others, except maybe if your freezer is going through wider than normal temperature swings. If this were the case you'd expect to get a lot of iciness and not just sugar issues. The easiest solution to sugar crystalizing is invert syrup. For sorbets I aim for sugar in a ratio of 65% sucrose, 25% dextrose, and 10% trimoline. Total sugars are about 18% of the total mix. These percentages include sugar from any fruit ... so I use online tables to modify the added sugars depending on the fruit I'm using. Stabilizers do a great job modifying textures and preventing iciness, but I don't if they're effective against sugar crystalization.

You don't have to worry about the flavor of fructose when the blend of sugars is 10% trimoline. I promise. Blindfolds and a wager Invert syrup is around 30% sweeter than sucrose, but has 90% greater freezing point suppression. Dextrose has high freezing point suppression as well, but has about 30% less sweetness than sucrose. Having a sweeter sugar in the mix allows you get your desired sweetness with less sugar total. Unlike the dry sugars it helps stabilize the free water in the recipe and it helps prevent crystalization of the sugars. It is especially helpful in any recipe with dry ingredients like chocolate, nuts or nut pastes, or dried fruits. The ratio of saccharides that I suggested is comparable to the ratio that exists natually in many fruits. I don't want to get sucked into an absurdist Defence of Fruits, but I will suggest that their sweetness tends to taste natural, if nothing else. Keep in mind that honey is mostly invert syrup. I think it tastes pretty nice.

Lustig's fructose rants strike me as highly suspect. He has come under a lot of criticism in the research community for basing his conclusions on (other people's) studies that are of poor quality. Even so, his peer-reviewed research doesn't make claims that are as bombastic as the ones he makes publicly. Beware of researchers who make melodramatic cases directly to the public—most are quacks. Lustig is not a quack, but he's become a zealot on an issue that has virtually no other scientific support. I don't think anyone outside the soft drink industry will dispute that it's a good idea to cut down on sugar. But to demonize it as poison, or to single out and demonize the monosacharide that we're most evolved to eat—I don't think he or anyone else has made that case. Eat less ice cream. But make it good! This means using the sugars that make it good.

Bojana's exactly right. And no need to worry about "extra fructose." Invert sugar has the same amount of fructose as the table sugar it's made from. I have never seen real evidence even hinting at health (or other) reasons to avoid it. Beware the pseudoscience of the blogosphere! If you were ever to find a real reason to reduce fructose, you'd want to avoid fruit.

Here's a rough guideline for sugars that I find works well. I like the total sugars to be 14 to 15% of the recipe by weight. The breakdown is roughly 65% sucrose, 25% dextrose (powdered glucose—not atomized glucose), and 10% trimoline (I make my own invert syrup ... it keeps a long time). This formula gives a final ice cream that's a bit less sweet than store bought ice cream or most home recipes, but that has ample freezing point suppression. There's no need for adding alcohol to the mix, or for serving at overly warm temps. I formulate this for a drawing temperature of 23°F/ -5°C (this is the temperature at which you remove from the ice cream machine), and a serving temp of 6° to 10°F / -14° to -12°C. It's also more resistant to iciness than a comparable recipe made with all sucrose.

Venting the heat of a commercial range is probably only a problem if you get one with lots of burners. It's the total BTUs going into the air that matters. I don't think you'll have a problem with any 36" range. Most likely, well before you got to the point where you couldn't ventilate the heat, you'd get to the point where you don't have enough gas supply. The big daddy commercial ranges expect (I think) a 3/4" gas hookup. The bigger pipe will deliver gas (and energy) at over twice the rate of the 1/2" pipes standard in home kitchens. A bigger issue is lack of insulation at the back. You need some kind of masonry firewall, or a ton of wall clearance, as Budrichard says. Sheetrock is not recommended. There will also be more hot surfaces on the outside of the stove that a kid could get burned on, and there's potential of setting cabinetwork on fire. you don't want wood things butted up against the thing like you would generally have in a home kitchen. It will also be about 6" deeper than the countertops.

I'm in the habit of using a bowl over a saucepan of water. Water has never been an issue. Just keep it out of the chocolate. Every pastry chef I know uses a microwave. It must work well. If you're paying attention and have a responsive pan you use direct heat. I realize every cookbook says that doing so will cause a kitten to die. I'm just not often in that big a hurry. There are other things to do while the chocolate melts.

My custards don't thicken until around 185, but I use about a third as many yolks as what most recipes call for. I've read (but haven't tested) that the lower the yolk concentration, the higher the thickening temperature.

Thanks for posting, JoNorvelle. The one remaining question I have is about time spent at temperature. Pasteurization works by heating milk for a specific amount of time, presumeably to minimize effects on flavor. For example, flash pasteurization heats milk very briefly to minimize flavor effects. Standard pasteurization today heats milk to around 161°F for 15 seconds; UHT pasteurization to 275°F for one second. I'd be curious to know if you pick up any cooked flavors by heating to 185 and holding for a minute (a slightly exaggerated mimicking of making custard with a low number of yolks). I might try this myself.

Nonfat dry milk can take on an off flavor. I'm guessing it's something oxidizing from age or bad storage. In my recipes I usually include a note to sniff the dry milk for signs of any lack of freshness. I can't taste it in the ice cream, even in delicate flavors. The best pastry chefs in the country use it. On the other hand, I'm pretty sensitive to the flavor of overcooked milk. Edited to add: a lot of nonfat dry milks have whey and other ingredients in them. I look for brands that are 100% milk.

A couple of general thoughts on Japanese knives ... First, consider any recommendations of specific brands to have an expiration date. Like maybe a year. The best knives go through a cycle: an insider discovers a knife that's newly available (in the U.S. or wherever) and which outperforms everything else in its price range. It gets cult status, and then it gets widely known, and then the price goes up. It's not a great value anymore. The Tojiro knives mentioned here were THE knives several years ago. They cost in the $50 or $60 range, and outperformed knives at twice the price. Word got out, and now they cost over twice as much. To their credit, Tojiro did improve the finish of the knives, but they are not the knockout value that they once were. A year after the price hike, Korin started imported knives under their house name Togiharu, and these became the next value leader. I don't know the status of these knives today, since I haven't been shopping. This happens at the high end also. I bought an Ikkanshi Tadatsuna knife, because its performance was the same as that of the much more expensive Suisin wa gyuto. Chefs were flocking to the Tadatsuna for a year or so. Now that knife costs as much as a Suisin, and everyone's buying something else. The new contenders are every bit as good; they just cost less. For now. Unrelatedly, you want to consider just how Japanese in styling you want to go. Many of the knives that people buy here are designed and made exclusively for export to the West. Shun, for example, is designed for American and European cooks who don't want to relearn how to use a knive. They have much thicker, more durable blades than the higher performance Japanese knives. They hold up to European knife techniques. People who are willing to learn new techniques—both for cutting and for sharpening—can use much thinner, higher performance knives. Both paths are legitemate and present different sets of tradeoffs. You just want to know which is your own camp so you don't buy wrong knife.

First, check out the thread on Alan Ducasse's method for cooking a thick steak. A lot of other methods get thrown in for comparison. Piles of information. Second, I'd suggest being warry of grass-fed beef. It's great when it's great, which is occasionally. Most of U.S. pastureland gets way less than 12 months of green grass. This means a significant amount of a steer's diet will be hay or sillage, which contributes little flavor or marbling: the worst of both worlds. I've given up on the many grass feeding ranches here in the north east. The best I've had is from Hearst Ranch in central California, where they have 12 months of green. That was great, but a completely different great from high end of prime, grain-finished beef (preferably with a lot of dry age). The latter is hard to find retail in most parts of the country, unless you mail order it. But it remains my favorite. Like a lot of people I'm not a proponent of grilling good quality beef. Grilling is about adding gobs of char and smoke flavor. It's not subtle. I love a nice grilled piece of meat, but when I get the really good stuff, it gets sauteed with butter, or cooked sous vide, with a pan sauce served on the side. No smoke or fire gets near it.

I'm not sure I understand the advantages of the milk heating method. I actually like to cook the milk as little as possible, in order to preserve it's flavor. I'm not fond of the flavor of cooked milk. To increase solids, just add nonfat dry milk. It's what all the pastry chefs I know do. In my own recipes I use 20 to 30g per Kg of mix, depending on the solids added by other ingredients.

Has anyone tried using a Vita Prep to pulverize pistachios? What about toasting them, and then blending them at high speed with the milk or cream? If I had the machine I'd try...

My best flavor this year is one I call Quartet of Dark Sugars. The flavor comes from the sweeteners: dark muscovado sugar, caramel, maple syrup, and chestnut honey. There's also salt and a bit of vanilla, just because those flavors blend so well. It's not overly sweet; I keep the total sugar levels relatively low. The honey includes some inverted sugar, which helps suppress the freezing point at at lower sugar levels. There's ample bitterness from the chestnut honey and the caramel, and a sense of a lot of layers. People tell me it's full of familiar flavors that they can't quite name. And that it's grown-up's ice cream ... it takes a bit or two to decide you like it.

I estimate that there's just over 110mg calcium in this recipe from the cream, which wouldn't be enough. I did some calculations and came up with the following: 175g heavy cream 30g liqueur 15g sugar 9g calcium gluconate-lactate 1g salt 100g dark chocolate, chopped This is assuming the mixture sold as gluconate-lactate is 50:50. This brings the total calcium to just below where it was with the chloride recipe (I didn't even take the cream into account when I worked it out before). I'll see how making spheres from liquid ganache goes. If I flub that, then I'll try the freezer molds. Thanks for all the great advice.

This may be the simplest solution. I should probably try it before the others. The recipe could stay the same; it will be liquid enough when it's still warm. Is this true? Does all the chloride get rinsed off? I thought spheres made this way would continue to thicken over time. Especially with ganache, since the cream must have some calcium in it. If this isn't an issue I'll try standard spherification. If not I'm interested in other sources of calcium, like the lactate Tri 2 Cook mentioned.

That sounds great, Robert, but it's a different dessert. It also sounds harder, not easier. Hand-rolling to make smooth balls was one part of my process I'm trying to eliminate.

Well, I like the idea of avoiding the calcium chloride flavor. In the chocolate it just tasted like salt, but it ruined the fruit. Do the lactate and gluconate not have flavor? Are there problems with making those substitutions? I'd be grateful for recommendations on sphere molds. never used them. Sounds like they're easier Than i had assumed.

I thought about freezing in molds but was hoping for something easier. I don't want to use xanthan because i want to mimimally influence the texture when it's melted. I just want it to adhere to iteself better so it's not just a mess when making the balls. If I could use a mellon baller that would be great. No unpleasant taste in the chocolate from the calcium chloride, but I made some spherized straweberry this morning that tasted like road salt. It's an acquired taste.

So, half a decade or so after everyone got sick of spherification I decided to start doing it. I needed to bring something to an erotic dessert party, and thought chocolate truffles that explode in the mouth would be the ticket. It worked pretty well. People loved them, and made incredible faces, wondering about what was going on in there. One friend said they were like "yolks of the ganache vulture" ... a name that has stuck. Unfortunately, making them was a gross process. My assumption that a mellon baller would work for scooping the cold ganache into the alginate was thwarted by their crumbly texture. I ended up forming the balls by hand, which left me looking like I was covered in poop. Here's the recipe (it's for reverse spherification): 175g heavy cream 30g liqueur 15g sugar 3.2g calcium chloride 100g dark chocolate, chopped The chocolate is chilled in the freezer before making balls, and then soaked in hot water to melt the centers before serving. Two thoughts I had are substituting invert syrup for the sugar, and adding gelatin (enough to give them better adhesion while cold, but not so much as to thicken them noticeably while melted). Any better ideas?

A few words on the actual mixer problems ... I think the majority of mixers break from abuse. Few people understand how fragile the transmission of a planetary mixer is compared with the direct drives of machines like blenders and food processors. You can demolish a 90 Quart hobart by throwing frozen sticks of butter into it ... it doesn't happen often because the people who own these know how to use them. I don't think this is the case among people here on egullet, but if you read some of the complaints elsewhere on the web, the posters don't inspire much confidence. A source of real mixer problems is that KA doesn't instruct their customers to properly break in the mixers. I've heard from more than one technician that the food-grade grease in the gear housing is extremely viscous until it warms up. In a new mixer it will have settled into the bottom or sides of the gear box where it is relatively useless. If you unpack a new mixer and make a full size batch of low-hydration bread, you are possibly taking years off the life of the mixer. The mixer should run unloaded for many minutes, preferably in a warm room, and should be used for a few light duty tasks before being worked hard. This will liquefy and distribute the lubricant properly. Among the real flaws that have caused mass headaches for KA users is the plastic gear housing issue mentioned by Ericthered. The earlier version of the "professional" bowl lift mixers had a thermoset plastic gear housing (earlier mixer designs used the chasis of the mixer itself as the housing, which was solid but made assembly and service much more labor intensive). The housing would get hot under load, distort, let the gears fall out of alignment, and then gears would break left and right and the housing itself would fail. This was a disaster for many people who used the mixer for what it was advertised for. KA eventually found a contractor that could injection mold the cover from magnesium. This material is rigid, heat-stable, and dissipates heat efficiently (it even has a built-in heat sink). That problem was solved. It only persists in that KA refused to acknowledge the origninal design as a flaw, and so they will not offer the new cover as a preventative measure (it's a drop-in replacement) nor will they tell you what serial numbers use the old vs. the new part. At this point, though, it's very unlikely that you'll get a plastic one, even from the refurb store. I got my mixer as a refurb and the first thing I did is pop the cover to check the gear box. The remainder of the problems seem to be sample variation. The gears in these units are not industrial quality. They spin on bronze friction bearings, not sealed ball or roller bearings, and there's a fair amount of wiggle room. The gears themselves are not precision machined. It follows that a certain number of mixers made this way are going to fall outside of spec and have more problems than others. Unfortunately, and once again, if you demand Hobart quality you'll pay Hobart prices.

Ghoul, you are correct about the belt drive in the Hobart mixers. I looked at the diagrams and it appears to deliver power to the transmission before the speed is reduced and the torque is increased, which makes perfect sense.I I don't find reason to agree with your assessment of superior Kenwood quality. It doesn't take much of a search to find plenty of people complaining about broken Kenwood mixers. The difference is that the complaints on this side of the Atlantic extend into the near impossibility of getting good service. KA mixers break all the time, but if they break under warranty, KA's doting service people apologetically send you a new one ... all the while maintaining the happy illusion that you're the first person this has ever happened to. If a mixer breaks out of warranty, parts are available everywhere, and the repairs are pretty straightforward. Plenty of independent techs can do it for you or you can figure it out yourself with online help. I don't doubt doubt that the situation is reversed in other parts of the world. If I lived in Europe, I'd buy a Kenwood. No way would I buy one here. I would greatly prefer it if KA did better quality control, but I understand their gambit. Probably only a small percentage of their mixers actually gets used. Most are eye candy and wedding present fodder. If ten percent of the five percent that get used breaks, then perhaps it's cheaper to pay for after-sales service than strict QC. Annoying as hell, but I get it. If anyone actually wants Hobart quality, you're going to have to pay Hobart prices. No way around that. The best bet is to often to buy used, if you live near a city that has restaurant supply stores and authorized technicians.

I've looked inside the Kenwood / Cuisinart / Delonghi mixers. If anything they strike me as a notch down from KA in robustness. For one thing, they are belt-driven, something that seems like a curious choice in a high torque appliance, and one that you never see in a professional mixer. As far as reliability, I get the impression that the Kenwoods and rebranded Kenwoods are about as spotty as KA and everything else. The big difference is that in the U.S., there is excellent warranty service on KA but not Kenwood; in Europe the situation is reversed. I think the smartest bet, if you are going with a consumer planetary mixer, is KA over here and Kenwood over there, and realize that there's a decent chance with either that you'll need warranty service. Just be sure to use the bejeezus out of thing in the first year so you'll know something's wrong before too late. The other choices are a professional mixer (like Hobart) at around four times the price, or a spiral mixer (like Electrolux) which require a different working style and which have different abilities and limitations. As far as the plastic gear goes, Shalmonese is right. This did not represent a cheapening of KA mixers. They used a plastic gear (originally phenolic) since 1909. It was eventually changed to nylon. The larger bowl-lift mixers have an all-metal drive train. They get their protection from a thermal shutoff switch. This is a newer design. I find it works well, but it's by no means free of QC issues. My first one went back after 3 months. It didn't break; it just gave hints that something was wrong with the gears. The replacement's been going strong for 4 years. I definitely recommend going to KA's site and getting a factory refurb. The prices are excellent, and the only downside is a shorter warranty (but if you get a bad mixer, it won't take you a year to figure it out).