paulraphael

You remove a bunch of metal when you rebevel a knife for sure. Doesn't matter whether you use a machine or edge pro or water stones. And after you've done enough sharpening to significantly shorten the height of the blade, it's important to thin the blade overall. This also removes a bunch of metal. I don't know if you can thin a knife on an edge pro or not. You certainly can't use any of the machines like the chef's choice. Edited to add: a ruler is more useful than a milligram scale to know in practical terms how much metal you've removed. You want to think about thinning when your blade has a couple of mm height.

How would you describe it? What distinguishes it?

Also, did you check the popsicle thread? Some people there really know what they're doing.

I'd be inclined to go light on sugar, and don't use anything besides table sugar (unless you can find a sweetener that has less freezing point depression for the same sweetness). And maybe skip the cream, or go light on it. Popsicles don't usually have dairy in them ... the lactose in the dairy depresses the freezing point. And the fat displaces some of the water. So if you just try to make pops with an ice cream formula they may be too soft. You won't have enough ice. Just a guess—I haven't played with popsicles. There's no problem with leaving out eggs or stabilizers. They won't do anything helpful in a popsicle, unless you like the effect they have on the melted texture.

Maybe so. I avoid milk and cream that have added stabilizers, just because there's no way to know exactly how much of what is in there. I'm not courting additional mysteries. It's possible that there's enough gum in these creams to muck with your stabilizer formulas. It's also possible that it's just enough to make up for the viscosity lost during ultra-pasteurization, and you won't notice a difference. I really don't know.

Great question. You have to find brands that hydrate at lower temperatures. I use TIC Gums POR/A, which hydrates at 165°F. The LBG sold by Modernist Pantry has the same specification and is probably the same stuff repackaged. Will Powders' version may also hydrate at low temps ... can't remember for sure.

New Favorite: Ford's gin instead of Plymouth. It has the low notes and the body and the oily mouthfeel of Plymouth, but more juniper. Really good stuff. I'm looking forward to trying the navy strength version. Still 1:1:1 with Cocchi di Torino. As posted elsewhere, I've been drinking a variation of this fromnot-yet-clean empty jars of Wilkin & Son's Tawny Orange Marmalade. This might be my favorite thing ever. And not just because of the lion.

Patio or outdoor café table.

The numbers might be optimistic, but there are many ways you could blow more air than a leaf blower and make less noise. A bigger motor is usually quieter than a smaller one. A bigger fan spinning more slowly is quieter than a small one spinning fast. There's also a question of the quality of the noise. People are less sensitive to low-frequency whooshing sounds than they are to high-frequency whining sounds. Apple gives a master class in these principles with the their desktop workstations. By using large fans that spin more slowly, and by keeping air paths direct and open, they make air-cooled machines quiet enough to use in recording studios even when all the processor cores are going bonkers.

Did I understand correctly that codes in NYC don't allow you you to vent to the outside?

I haven't found sharpness to be a problem when infusing mint into ice cream. The problems are more about avoiding cooked, grassy, and vegetal flavors, while retaining a real sense of the fresh mint. We have the same problems identifying garden mint. Absolutely no idea what variety we're growing now. It tastes more like peppermint than spearmint, but I think there are dozens of possible types.

It does taste fake, like mouthwash or candycanes or most of the world's mint ice cream. But I think it can be useful in minute quantities. If you use a fraction of what someone would use if it were the sole flavor ingredient, you can bring back some of the vibrance that fresh mint loses in extraction processes. I always want the fresh mint flavor to dominate, and the oil to fill in holes in the background. Has anyone experimented with cold-infusions of mint? I'll try the one-minute method and see how it goes. My garden is full of mint at the moment.

We did a lot of inclusions at the ice cream shop where I worked ages ago. Crunched up heath bars might have been the champ for keeping their crunch. That's basically your toffee idea, plus chocolate. Grape nuts worked well, but I don't think it was such a sharp crunch ... more like nuts. Oreos don't really crunch that much in ice cream. M&Ms lost all their color. Grey disks in gray ice cream. That was a flop. Best bets might be candies cooked to a hard stage (but in small pieces) or any crunchy stuff enrobed in chocolate or caramel. Mix it in by hand after the ice cream has partially hardened.

I think mint is one of the most challenging flavors to get right. In anything ... ice cream, cocktails, whatever. I've done some experimenting with different infusion techniques, and have looked at research (haven't found much). Dave arnold has nailed it, but his approach requires liquid nitrogen. There's often a catch with him. My next attempt at mint ice cream is going to be with a tiny bit of mint oil, and then cold-infusing the mint into the base after the base is cooked and cooled. And with some citric acid in the base to slow the mint oxidizing. How are you doing it?

Thanks everyone. It turns out Daniel will do a table for 5 if you ask nicely, so we got a reservation there. It's for later in September, so who knows what the weather will be. We're utterly at its mercy. If a hurricane or cold snap rolls through we may need to rethink things.

I recall many desserts being not so minimalist. The lettering always shames me. Everyone in that kitchen is better with a pastry bag than I am with a pencil.

Michael Laiskonis talked about this quite a bit. It's why his recipes were all very low fat (often 4% to 6% milkfat—what many would associate with Northern Italian gelatos). He considered that the ice cream would be part of a very elaborate plated dessert, that came at the end of rich multicourse meal. he didn't want people to end their meals with a fat bomb on the plate. He aimed for something more refreshing.

If you send me the whole recipe (in grams) I can quickly work it out.

Lactose is one of the most useful, in the form of the skim milk powder (which is really a wonder ingredient). It's 50% lactose by weight. This sugar has the same freezing point depression as sucrose, at about 16% the sweetness. Atomized glucose can also be useful, although it's not consistent from one brand to the next. It's mostly a naturally occurring blend of dextrose and maltodextrin (and other dextrins). I use it in sorbets, to boost solids without greatly increasing sweetness. In sorbets, trehalose can take the place of lactose. The properties are very similar, but you can only use it in small quantities. Lots of numbers in the chart on this page. Thanks to your reminder I will add glycerin / glycerol.

Blue Hill already caught my attention. I've never been there, but have wanted to go, and it seems like the kind of cooking she'd love. The NYC restaurant doesn't seem to have a website. There's a 3rd party site that's taking reservations (and they're available) but it's a little odd to not have information from the horse's mouth. Anyone been lately?

We want to take my godmother out for her 90th birthday. Looking for a great restaurant that's 1) open and 2) has outdoor seating. First choice was Le Bernardin, which is closed. Jean Georges and Nougatine have no reservations, and Daniel will only seat parties of 4 (we have 5). Thoughts??

I'm sure some of it's subjective. For me part of the complaint is "this is too sweet!" which is surely subjective. The other part is that I find other flavors getting masked. I think this is a phenomenon more akin to how the right amount of salt makes other flavors pop into focus. Too little salt leaves those flavors feeling flat. I think something similar goes on with sugar in desserts (but in this case with too much), especially with more complex or delicate flavors.

I think it's more complicated than just a temperature. The concentration of egg yolk and the time at temperature seem to be factors. I haven't experimented with this at all because I use little or no egg yolk, and fairly low temps.

There are ways to make great lower-fat ice creams without making them sweeter. I don't know why she's pushing the sugar so hard.

Welcome to my personal broken-record gripe. I think most ice cream is too sweet. I've got a plenty big sweet tooth, but start complaining when sweetness levels reach a point that they mute other flavors. In a review of ice cream books I recently wrote, Cree's book got top marks but I still complained about sweetness levels. Same goes for Lebovitz and just about everyone else. The way to estimate sweetness is to look at the sucrose equivalence. A sucrose equivalence of 15% means it tastes as sweet as 15% table sugar. Alternative sugars like dextrose and fructosse are more or less sweet, so you need to do a bit of math with them. A gram of dextrose is about as sweet as 1.4 gram sucrose. A gram of fructose is about as sweet as 0.5% sucrose. A gram of honey is about as sweet as 0.75g sucrose. Most commercial and professional recipes are around 15% sucrose equivalence (If you're an ice cream techie or an Italian, you can call this a POD of 150—Potere Dolcificante). Many home recipes are sweeter. I usually prefer a level around 12%, or POD 120. If there are very bitter or sour flavors in the ice cream, you may have to increase this to compensate. I think of ingredients like cocoa powder as having a negative POD. To your question, adding skim milk powder in place of some of the sucrose is a good start, and you can do this without doing any math, to a point. The lactose in skim milk powder has the same freezing point depression as table sugar, but a very small fraction of the sweetness. It will also promote a smoother, denser texture. If you go too far, the texture might get denser and chewier than you like. And if you're not using any stabilizers, you could get a sandy texture from lactose crystalizing (coming out of solution). In that recipe, by glucose, does she mean glucose syrup? This always drives me nuts, because the names aren't standardized. And the contents of glucose syrup aren't standardized either. I'd be inclined to ditch the glucose syrup and just use dextrose, but to make this work predictably you'd have to do a bunch of math.