paulraphael

A few years ago I had a cucumber gazbacho at café boulud ... one of the rare times I couldn't stop myself from pulling out a notebook and trying to reverse engineer the thing at the table. I ran home and cobbled together my own knockoff. Mine wasn't as good as Daniel Boulud's, but it was pretty tasty ... I don't think you could go too wrong with any combination of these ingredients. They included: cucumbers red onion shallot garlic yogurt olive oil mint smoked salmon vinegar or lemon

I don't think polypropylene has any effect on the taste. Most of the whitish squeeze bottles and capped bottles are made out of that (look for the recycling symbol ... should say 5 and PP). I've seen them at outdoor stores and at restaurant supply stores. If you use one of the squeeze bottles, forget the little red cap on the tip. Just put some plastic wrap over the opening and screw the large cap over it. I always bring olive oil on climbing / backpacking trips, especially in the winter. A big dollop does wonders for a freeze-dried climber's entré. I'm not interested in having a glass bottle in my pack.

Really? I thought rum was made with molasses or cane juice. Will it still taste rum-like when made with refined sugar?

Here's a Times Magazine aritcle on Jake Godby, who puts us all to shame ... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/magazine/04icecream-t.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

My current kitchen has pine plank floors dating back to the civil war. No idea how they're finished, but I doubt they've been refinished in the last ten years. They take a lot of traffic, the gallons of dishwater and cooking oil I routinely spill on them, and they look great ... not pristine, but i doubt they looked pristine when brand new. Their basic rustic nature conceals most damage quite well. If I were building a new kitchen, I'd take a good look at the bamboo options. I like the sustainability, and how well they likely do in wet environments.

What would you call booze fermented from simple syrup? And what would you call it if you distilled it?

This would mostly have to do with the thermal capacity of the canister. The one I'm used to is pretty massive, so I don't have that issue, but possibly some smaller / lighter canisters would have limitations. You could compensate by making smaller batches of ice cream. Simple Philly style ice cream is easier to freeze because there are fewer nonfat solids in the mix supressing the freezing point. The flip side of this is they tend to be hard as a brick at freezer temperatures. A properly balanced recipe, whether it has custard in it or not, should be the right texture for scooping at eating at around 9 or 10°F ... and any such recipe will place equal demands on an ice cream machine.

A simple way to adjust is by adding nonfat dry milk.

The berries need to be really good, intensely flavored ones. And the recipe should be fairly low fat ... I'd aim for 10% to 12% milk fat, and as little egg custard as you can get away with. Fat strongly mutes the flavors of fruit. It's why so many pastry chefs make sorbets for their fruit flavors.

I haven't done this with grilled chicken, but an option is to par cook by poaching in a flavorful stock. Even an easy court bouillon that you can whip together one or two hours before cooking the bird. The stock can serve as your cooking medium and your marinade, and can then be saved as the foundation for your next batch of chicken stock. I think it's best to keep the poaching liquid just below the simmer. Dry the surface as well as you can before grilling.

The only reason to use invert syrup in place of corn syrup is if you want your ice cream to be sweeter. It has the same freezing point suppression (roughly) as corn syrup, but unlike corn syrup it's sweeter than sucrose, not less sweet. So it's just another arrow to keep in your quiver to help control sweetness and hardness independently of each other.

I'm a big believer in uncooked sauce with minimal ingredients and good canned tomatoes. Cooked sauces cook twice, and can get gummy or pasty and lose a lot more of their fresh flavor. The catch is that canned tomatoes, even a high end brand, vary quite a bit from can to can and month to month. The basic recipe of tomatoes and salt sometimes needs to be adjusted, either with a bit of added sugar or acid, or with rinsing to get rid of the metalic, bitter flavor that sometimes accompanies them. Here's a method I've been using, adapted from Jeff Varasano's endless scroll on pizza making: - pass tomatoes through a food mill using the fine disk. this should remove any stray skins and most of the seeds. - pour into a very fine strainer or chinois that's set over a bowl. do not force through the strainer. allow liquid to drip through for 10 minutes or so. Pour this strained liquid back into the strainer, and allow to drip for another 10 or 15 minutes. The liquid that drips through the strainer this time should be mostly clear. -taste the liquid that has dripped through. if it's not bitter, you're done. If it IS bitter, discard. add a few ounces of water to the puree in the strainer, and wait 10 or 15 minutes for liquid to drip through. Repeat until liquid that drips through has lost its bitterness. -pour puree from strainer into a bowl. Taste and carefully season (salt, possibly pepper, possibly a touch of sugar, possibly a touch of vinegar. and if you insist, other stuff).

I'm curious to hear about different characteristics of these acids. I've got citric and tartaric in the pantry, but not the others.

Cornstarch and custard both work as stabilizers. Really, anything that thickens the mix is a stabilizer. Stabilizers work (mostly) by impeding the free movement of water. This not only thickens the texture / mouthfeel of the ice cream, but also keeps water droplets from moving around, finding each other, and freezing into bigger ice crystals. Corn syrup doesnt work as a stabilizer, but has a couple of effects. It has stronger freezing point suppression than table sugar, so it will give a softer texture at any given temperature. This is because it's mostly glucose, which, being a smaller molecule than sucrose, naturally has this property. Also, it's less sweet than sucrose, so to get the same sweetness you'll use more of it. Corn syrup also has the property of discouraging sugar crystalization. That's a reason you see it in icings and chocolates and ganaches. I've never had this problem in ice cream, but if you ever do, you can try fixiing it with corn syrup. Glucose syrup, atomized glucose, or dextrose powder can all substitute for corn syrup (you'd have to do some math to figure out the conversions).

I use it mostly on low speed, but toward the end I'll often crank it up to 3 or 4 for a couple of minutes, especially if I don't see any increase in volume. Low speed, vertical machines tend to give you very little overrun (ice cream jargon for volume increase from added air). I like dense, low-overrun ice creams, but sometimes my machine will go too far in that direction if used only on the lowest speed.

Yeah, the mix should always be very cold before you start spinning it. For one thing, all ice cream mixes should age for at least four hours (ideally overnight) before spinning in the machine, and this needs to happen in the fridge. So room temperature mix should never even be a consideration. In addition to chilling, aging the mix allows the proteins to hydrate and the fat globules to properly crystalize. This is essential to the smoothness and whipability of the final ice cream. It's also a good time for flavors from ingredients like herbs and spices to continue infusing.

Ha ... I just happen to know some of the real ice cream and knife experts, and I bug them a lot. My hunch is that the frozen canister machines can outperformm the less expensive compressor machines, as long as you get your freezer cold enough. But I don't have first hand experience with compressor machines, and assume there's a huge range in performance. I recently visited a pastry kitchen that has a $15,000 Carpigiani machine that will freeze a batch in 4 minutes ... so it's probably safe to say that compressor models range from among the worst to the best of the best. I don't think there's a type of ice cream that will favor one kind of machine over another. The most important factor is the time it takes to freeze the ice cream. Faster is better; if you can't freeze it fast, then you'll have to put more attention into stabilizing your mix in order to get smooth results. There are a couple of other factors i haven't mentioned, like dasher speed, and other design elements that will make one machine tend to pump more air into the ice cream than another. One thing nice about the stand mixer attachment is that you can control the speed. With machines that don't offer controls, you can tweak your formulas to encourage more or less whipping.

Darrienne, many thanks for the vote of confidence, but remember that I'm just a guy who not long ago was asking the same questions you're asking now. I have my own guru, and he has his! Back to the question ... if ice cream is icy, there are a handful of likely factors. Two have nothing to do with the machine: the formula you're using, and how quickly you harden the ice cream after spinning it (which is a factor of freezer temperature and the size of the container you've put the ice cream in). The two most likely factors contributed by the machine are the speed of freezing, and the drawing temperature, which just means the temperature of the ice cream when you've finished spinning it. The speed of freezing is mostly influenced by the power of the machine's compressor (or the temp of the freezer used to chill the canister). The drawing temperature is either determined by an automatic program, or by you. Aaccording to my guru's guru—an ice cream scientist name Cesar Vega whose lecture I recently attended—the ideal drawing temperature is -5°C / 23°F. He says he's flabbergasted when he asks pastry chefs their drawing temperature and they have no idea. At the very least, picking a drawing temperature is a way you can standardize your formulas ... if they all whip up to the right hardness at the same drawing temperature, you know you're not compensating for formula differences by freezing the mix more or less. If you get your drawing temperature in the right ballpark, and can get it there fairly quickly, and have no serious issues with your formula, you should be able to make smooth ice cream. I'm curious to know how long some of the machines (especially the ones with compressors) take to freeze the ice cream. If your machine takes longer than 20 minutes, then I suspect you're going to have some crunchy ice crystals unless your formula includes some good stabilizing ingredients.

I've gotten excellent results with the kitchenaid attachment for the mixer. It's pretty big, so you need to be willing to sacrifice some freezer space. The upside is that the capacity is high. I think it could probably handle 1-1/2 quarts, but I generally make 1 qt at a time. The temp of your freezer makes a big difference. I keep mine at minus 5°F or colder, which allows ice cream to spin quickly and then harden quickly. Between this and a good formula, I get results that aren't icy at all. Typical time to spin a quart of ice cream when the freezer is this cold is 7 to 10 minutes. This method would not be good if you need to make more than one batch of ice cream a day. For that you need a machine with a compressor, and I'm guessing you'd need a very expensive one to better the results of the KA matched with a cold freezer.

I'm not actually looking for "natural" ... assuming this means fat-based soap rather than detergent. I think detergents just work better, and there's no downside to them that I can see. I just find that the perfumes used are too tennacious. Coffee should not taste like synthetic grapefruit.

I like reading the insane copy in the fine print on the Dr. Bronner's bottles, but I'm not a fan of the soap.

I'm reviving this ancient thread. The dish soaps I buy at the the supermarket are annoying, especially because their fruity scents linger in things like my coffee press and thermos. Liqu-nox looks interesting but costs a lot and I don't know wher to buy locally. What about commercial products from restaurant supply stores? Are there any unscented, no b.s. soaps that work well?

I'm just looking quickly at my notes ... Gelatin, I believe, is subject to synerisis, so it may not be the ideal stabilizer. Here's a list of some colloids that prevent synerisis and their typical concentrations: -iota carageenan (0.2 to 1.5%) -high acyl gellan (0.03 to 2.6%) -combination of agar and locust bean gum (0.1 to 0.2% lcb / 0.1 - 3% agar)

That sounds like a crazy amount of stabilizer ... most stabilizers are used at well under 1% by weight. I assume it's just some blend of hydrocolloids that prevent weeping (aka synerisis, if you want to get poetic).

I came up with a flavor this winter that was about coaxing as many flavors as I could out of sugar. Emphasis was dark sugars, so the flavor ingredients were dark muscovado sugar, dark caramel, and chestnut honey. I really liked it. Part of the intrigue is that the blended flavors are both strange and familiar. I'd be surprised if anyone who tasted it blind would identify them.