paulraphael

Are these cooked sorbet bases, or do you have some other way of disolving the gelatin?

Sure, but that's going to be some blend, based on someone else's ideal ice cream characteristics, of three or more gums. I'd rather control the recipe. And I'd also rather not be dependent on a proprietary ingredient.

The trouble is that there are many blends, and an almost infinite number of possible blends, and all produce different textures and different results. I'd go crazier testing all the possibilities than I would testing the possibilities of a couple of simpler ingredients. Also, from what I've read, the main advantages of the more contemporary gums are price (not important in the quantities I'm making), extended shelf life (not important for my purposes), and the ability to work in minute quantities (actually a disadvantage for accurately weighing portions for a small batch). So far I'm getting impressive results with simple ingredients that I already keep in the kitchen. I'm just in the process of tweaking the details and am curious about other people's experience with this.

The reason I'm skeptical of this is that the egg foam structure just isn't likely to survive being disolved into the hot milk. I believe it will disappear entirely. And also, David Lebowitz says he's compared both methods side by side (whisked and unwhisked eggs) and can't tell any difference!

I've been experimenting with gelatin as a stabilizer in ice cream. So far I've disolved it in the traditional way, by blooming with a small amount of liquid (in this case a portion of the milk) and then mixing it in and heating it. But I found an article that says you can just mix it thoroughly with the sugar and disolve it that way. Is this a good idea? My understanding is that blooming is just to keep the the gelatin from clumping together and becoming difficult to disolve. It makes sense that dispersing it with an easy to disolve solid could help in the same way. Does anyone have experience with this? Also, I'm finding the gelatin is working in bizarrely small quantities. Recipes I've seen call for up to a tablespoon per quart of ice cream. I've found that using more than half a teaspoon (0.15% by weight) is too much ... gives a dense, puddingy consistency. I'm using it in conjunction with a bit of starch (3 to 6g) and a couple of yolks per quart, but it still seems strangely powerful. Thoughts?

I don't like fluffy ice cream either. But as it relates to this topic, I seriously doubt that making custard with foamed eggs would lead to a foamy ice cream.

Hmmm, I never thought of that one. This should work even without sugar, right?

News flash: plastic gets brittle in the freezer! I'm breaking all my plastic containers by scooping out of them. Casualties so far include ziplock storage containers and reused chinese restaurant containers. Any better ideas? Am I just supposed to be patient and wait for the ice cream to soften (fat chance!) ...?

Does he mention this in the context of ice cream? Stable foam is important for some things, like flourless chocolate cakes, but I'd think that any foam you make would vanish when you incorporate it into the crem anglaise for ice cream. Which I think is why you can incorporate the sugar any way you like with ice cream (but not everything). here's Lebovitz's short essay on gelato, where he mentions cornstarch: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/archives/2007...ats_gelato.html

Does anyone know anything about dasher speed? I'm using the Kitchenaid mixer attachment to make ice cream, so there's a huge range of speeds available. KA recommends the lowest speed. This is really slow. I've been looking for research-based articles online, and get a lot of conflicting information (faster=smaller ice crystals / faster=bigger ice crystals ... that kind of thing). I've also seen some suggestion that most of the overrun happens in the last couple of minutes of freezing, so maybe it makes sense to use a different speed at the end. Has anyone experimented with this?

I'd think it would work fine. The advantage of using milk and heavy cream is flexibility ... you can vary the fat percentage to anything you like. It does make a difference to use non-ultrapasteurized cream, especially in milder flavored ice creams. The flavor will be better. But it's probably a disadvantage to buy unhomogenized cream or milk from a small farm. The larger fat globules will result in less stable ice cream. I try to find the best quality, small farm, homogenized but minimally pasteurized cream that I can.

actually, I mean cornstarch. it's a common stabilizer in eggless, lowfat ice creams and gelatos. It's not mentioned in any of your books? That's what Lebovitz was anwering for me. He said in his experience it made no difference at all, just as you suspect. Personally, I whisk the sugar into the yolks when I'm using enough of them to disolve the sugar. Mostly out of habit, i guess. Otherwise I whisk it into the milk.

It might be interesting for your purposes to contrast some typical northern Italian recipes (higher fat, more yolks, more similar to French ice cream) with southern recipes (lower fat, often no cream or yolks, and often stabilized with cornstarch ... sometimes with a lot of it).

My guess is that sealing the surface with plastic wrap is mostly to prevent freezer burn (which is what Chefpeon is talking about). It can help prevent the surface from dehydrating, and ice crystals from growing on it, and also help keep flavors fresh. I doubt this will do much for shrinkage. Or with changes in overall texture, both of which seem to have more to do with the recipe and with consistency of freezer temps.

There's a primer here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=31701 This takes things a step farther, telling you how to retrograde the starch so you can puree the bejeezus out of the spuds without making them gluey. It works; I've done it a few times. But it's a lot of effort. My preference is for la ratte potatoes, french fingerlings, or russian bananas (I like my puree to have a lot of flavor). Other kinds are preferable if you want a more neutral puree. I find the 50% butter by weight varieties to be pretty ludicrous. They taste more like potato-thickened butter sauces than anything else. 20 to 30% butter is really rich and delicious, and retains the character of potatoes.

That's my understanding of it. For some kinds of preparations this is probably important ... like when you're baking something that's leavened by the egg foam, or mixing anything where this is the only opportunity for the sugar to disolve. In an ice cream base (or similar creme anglaise) it's not a big deal because the sugar will have plenty of opportunity to disolve in the hot milk. Ice cream is a pretty unstable (and improbable) emulsion of frozen and unfrozen water, fat globules, other solids, and air. The only things stopping it from deflating spontaneously are the network of ice crystals, and whatever viscosity the emulsified fats and any stabilizing ingredients give to the liquid. Time, and especially warming and cooling cycles (like the self-defrosting of the freezer, and taking the ice cream out and putting it back) all conspire to deflate the foam. These factors also lead to the ice crystal structure changing, and the ice cream getting grainy. Commercial ice creams use stabilizers (usually tiny amounts of gums like guar, carob bean, and carageenan) and strong emulsifiers like diglycerides to give them shelf life. They also use mixes of sugars that include things besides sucrose, for their influence on texture and stablilty. Home made ice creams usually rely on lots of cooked egg yolk (the lecithin and other chemicals are emulsifiers), very high butterfat, and the fact that the stuff rarely sticks around more than a few minutes after you make it. I'm noticing that pastry chefs often take a middle path ... using some commercial ingredients like powdered glucose, starches and gums, etc... They seem less interested in long shelf life than in being able to get perfect textures without relying on a french custard base and lots of fat in all their recipes.

You're in luck ... I just exchanged some email with David Lebovitz on incorporating sugar, and have been researching it elsewhere as well. Short story is that whisking sugar into the yolks won't make any difference to your custard. You can mix the sugar with the eggs, mix it straight into the milk, mix it well, or mix it badly. The point of whisking it \ into the yolks is just to disolve the sugar. And when the yolks get pale and thick, this is all that it means. You haven't caused any magical physical changes to the egg protein; you've just disolved the sugar in the eggs' water. The only reason I like to add sugar to the eggs (assuming I'm making a custard with enough yolks to disolve the sugar) is a hunch that the sugar might make the yolks a bit more resistant to curdling when you temper them. Just adding a bit of thermal mass to the yolks would help in this regard. But I have no idea if it's a significant difference. Most of my ice creams have a low number of yolks (too few to really disolve the sugar) so I just whisk the sugar into the milk.

My first trial with the arrowroot went pretty well. I made a 14% butterfat base (equal parts milk and heavy cream). 2 egg yolks per quart (cooked into the milk) and 2 teaspoons (6g) arrowroot. Nice and smooth, though I'm not completely sold on the feel of the ice cream after it melts in my mouth. Just the slightest sense of chalkiness or pastiness that you sometimes get with stabilized ice creams. I don't know for sure if this is from the starch, but that's my guess. It also remains to be seen how well the texture holds up. I'd like to be able to keep the ice cream around for a few days. Has anyone used gelatin in ice cream? That seems like a common choice. I like the idea because it's flavorless and it also loses viscosity when it warms up. I've never worked with it before, so when I read instructions to "bloom" it I have no idea what to do.

Great, thanks for all the tips. I've consulted McGee, but not Corriher. I'm making ice cream for non-commercial use, and am just chasing the holy grail of my own ideal ice cream. I've made it commercially before, but the stuff we made represented the owner's holy grail, not mine. And I wasn't at all involved in the theory behind the mix. So right now I'm thinking that traditional French (custard based) ice creams aren't my thing. Too eggy. But I like the smoothness and the mouthfeel. So I'm looking for some kind of compromise: maybe a couple of egg yolks per quart, something like 12% to 14% butterfat, and something else besides egg to improve smoothness and texture. I'm curious about corn starch, but am warry of it because I don't want to introduce any cereal flavors that could peek through more delicately flavored ice creams. I'm also a little wary of milk powder, since reconstituted milk tastes so bad. My first experiment (which I'll freeze tonight) uses arrowroot starch. I'll let you know how it goes. By the way, I got in touch with David Lebovitz about the sugar mixing. He says he mixes it with the milk because some people curdle their eggs by throwing sugar on them and not mixing them thoroughly right away. But other than that he can't taste a difference in side by side comparisons. And I've found that with lower numbers of yolks, it's not very practical to whisk the yolks and sugar. Too little liquid for all the sugar.

I'm just starting to make ice cream at home, and have been working from David Lebovitz's excellent book. But I'm finding the book to be thin on theory, which I'd like to learn more about so I can waste less time while experimenting and inventing recipes. I made ice cream professionally for a couple of years, but we had our base custom mixed for us by the dairy. So there's a lot that I didn't learn. Are there any good sources out there for ice cream / sorbet / gelato theory? Things like ratios of sugar to fat to liquid, emulsifiers, stabilizing ingredients, temperatures, etc. etc.?

I just got the first thermometer that I really like: a CDN Quicktip: http://www.amazon.com/Q2-450-Proaccurate-Q...12091967&sr=8-3 It seems like half the performance of a Thermopen at a quarter the price. Which about right for my purposes. I haven't used the thermopen, but people say it responds in a couple of seconds. The CDN responds in about 2 to 10 seconds (depending on how big the temperature swing is). It reads the temp right at the tip, can be calibrated with the push of a button (using ice water) and so far seems accurate. Not bad for under $20.

I went to Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago at the apartment of a friend who's a chef. She's married to a high school friend of mine who is not a chef. It was he who greeted us at the door, with a pained expression and a filthy apron and bags under his eyes. It turns out chef was flat on her back with stomach flu, but in the spirit of hardcore chefyness, had decided the meal must go on. The apartment was one of those Brooklyn railroad flats with the tiny kitchen right off the bedroom. This allowed chef to bark orders at her surrogate between fits of doubling over and moaning. Her husband had been doing the cooking all afternoon, but she put him on entertainment duty and had me take over the kitchen as soon as my coat came off. In her fever, chef had forgotten some details. "Is there any sauce?" "Oh, shit. Sauce. Can you make some sauce?" "Ok. Do you have any wine?" "Get it off the dining room table. See if one of the bottles looks cheaper than the others." "What should I serve the turkey on?" "I don't know. Look in those cabinets and see if anything's big enough." That kind of thing. The meal ended up being ok. Not as good as meals when our host is actually did the cooking, but perfectly edible. Unfortunately, it wasn't perfectly digestible. My girlfriend and I, and likely all the other guests, picked up the virus from the bedridden chef and spent most of the night and the next day purging ourselves of all holiday cheer.

Yeah, I'd definitely agree that the trajectories are far from clear, and that there's a lot of mixing and matching. Athough I don't think that's so different from what goes on in the art world at large. I can think of a lot of visual art that has qualities both of modernism and postmodernism. And there are plenty of idealogical paradoxes. Wallace Stephens made a case that William Carlos Williams' complete rejection of Romanticism was a fundamentally Romantic position. I'm not about to argue with Wally.

If we're going to get into labels, I'd call much of the avante garde cooking going on today post-modern, not modern. Postmodernism is if anything broader and messier and harder to define even than modernism, but art that falls under its umbrella often includes the following characteristics: -a rejection of modernist formalism and classicist heirarchies (I think of the 'new paradigm' restaurants' challenges to the tradtional structures of the dining experience) -appropriation of masterpieces (complete reinterpretations or recontextualizations of classic dishes) -appropriation of pop culture (cheeky reinterpretations or recontextualizations of comfort food ... Keller's bacon 'n eggs, surf 'n turf, etc.)

Ok, great! Pre-tested. So tell me which ones to get. I'm looking for simple stainless ones with a flat rim (easy to level off). And ones that I can find easily. Surely one of the sets in your collection fits the bill.