paulraphael

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.

... when so grievous has become your gout that you need assistance from the stable boy to operate the duck press.

I've stopped adding up the cost of my ice cream ingredients. It's a luxury you have if you're not trying to sell and profit. Some of the flavors I make (especially chocolate) end up costing way more than anything you can buy. Even if you assume my time is worth nothing (which seems to be the world's opinion).

Not the same. It's actually alkaline. It's the magic ingredient for making mac 'n cheese with any cheese you like.

Maybe. That can be a tough question. With countertop commercial machines it's hard to know if the ice cream quality will really inch in the direction of the big dogs (full-size Carpigiani machines, etc.) or if you're mostly buying robustness. I've been curious about machines like this but haven't had much luck finding reliable reviews. I assume they're made for a niche market, like very small restaurants or cafés that want to make their own, but at a fairly low volume.

Intellectual property law has been well tested when it comes to recipes. Neither the ingredients nor the method is protected. All that can be protected is the exact wording of the recipe (which falls under copyright law, not patents or anything that can be connected to ideas). So if you describe the method in your own words, you're not violating copyright anymore than if you describe the plot of a story. Some people take issue with this, and I understand why. I've just made peace with it. If I share a recipe, and you decide to give it away, I'd prefer if you share the exact wording. Same concern as yours ... please steal my actual ideas, not a bastardized version that's bound to disappoint. The most petty trope in cooking is the grandma who gives away a recipe but leaves out a critical step so no one can make it as well as her. I haven't experienced this myself. I hope it's a dead idea.

I use "steal" affectionately ... as in, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." Which may or may not be true, but it's fun to say. A nice thing about contemporary cooking culture is that most chefs give away their ideas freely. Recipe ideas aren't considered intellectual property. And if you have cooks working for you, there's no way to keep your tricks secret. So the best way to get credit for your ideas is to publish them. Get them into as many hands as possible, and everyone will know what you did. And then when someone takes your idea and turns it into something amazing and different, they'll publish their version ... and return the favor.

In these cases sometimes the best bet is to steal the flavor ideas and graft them on to your own base recipes.

You could also say she's discovering the pleasures of going beyond simple ice cream. She's describing doing quite a bit of the chemistry that pastry chefs do when striving for better textures. She wanted to get rid of eggs, and found a way to avoid thin and icy textures by adding milk solids (skim milk powder) alternative sugars (honey—which is mostly invert syrup, which has more freezing point depression and better water control than sucrose) and another freezing point depressant (alcohol, which isn't a great ingredient, but can work).

Than you, Mitch! By geeky you mean sexy? Silly autocorrect.

Just remember that dried whole milk much more perishable than dried skim. I even treat dried skim milk as if it's quite perishable (it isn't really, but it can take on stale flavors easily ... not sure if it actually gets stale of if it absorbs odors). I like to double bag milk powder and keep in the freezer. I'd definitely do this with whole milk powder.

Making only a pint almost certainly let it freeze faster, too.

Ruben's ice creams are all so high-fat and high-solids, I'm skeptical that of any of these protein cooking techniques make a real difference. If he's not comparing results with triangle tests, I'm not giving much weight to these opinions. Anything you do with a recipe that has those numbers is going to be rich and dense and smooth. And none of the technique stuff is going to have a meaningful effect on flavor.

That's great to know, Mitch. I'd be curious to hear your impressions of ice cream drawn at 11 minutes vs. 20, or whatever you were doing. It isn't guaranteed that the ice cream will be better if you draw it earlier. It's just highly likely that if your machine gets it to that temperature faster than some other machine, you'll see better texture with the fast machine. I think it's safe to say that -5C is a good maximum draw temperature. But I don't think there's harm churning a little longer, if it doesn't cause problems (like making butter!) It's possible that whether you get better or worse results by going longer will depend on how cold your hardening cabinet is (average home freezer? Extra-cold home freezer? Blast chiller?) One thing to consider: deciding on a consistent draw temperature helps you make your recipes more consistent ... you hope to see them with roughly the same consistency at that temperature.

Yeah, and she held at 77 for about 45 minutes. She started with raw milk, and centrifuged it to separate it into high-fat cream and low-fat milk. What she's calling nanofiltering is just reverse-osmosis. It's a heat-free way to remove water and condense the milk, to up the solids content. This was separate from the pasteurization step (which was done without evaporation), which she tailored for getting the milk proteins the way she liked (which was about texture, and also for flavor, according to her—although in my own blind tests no one could find any flavor difference between ice creams cooked at different times/temperatures within the ranges we tested). She hinted that her current methods (carried out by a dairy to her specs) are a bit different—maybe a somewhat shorter, hotter pasteurization. In her homemade recipes, she adds stabilization and milk solids through cream cheese (a pretty funny hack). So I don't know how much she relies on evaporation. I personally don't like using evaporation to concentrate milk solids. It's tedious, inconsistent, and offers no advantages over adding low-temperature spray-dried skim milk.

My guess is it's a home-friendly vague approximation of what she does in her commercial ice cream. She pasteurizes at a moderate temperature (I think she said 75°C) for close to an hour. At least this was when she was making the base in-house. The cooking is about denaturing the milk proteins to the right degree so they'll take the place of eggs as an emulsifier. She generally doesn't like eggs in her ice cream. Maybe she found that a 4-minute boil gets the job done reasonably well?

All vaguely traditional ways of cooking the base will pasteurize it. They go far beyond what's required.

I froze them in ziplock bags. They still eventually dried out. It's been well over 10 years.

Yeah, I've sometimes imagined being asked by a grade school teacher to give a lesson on ice cream, and making all the children cry. "Ok kids, put away everything besides your spreadsheets and your brix hygrometers." What do you think is a good source these days for vanilla? I used to buy from Vanilla Products USA but that was ages ago.

That's funny, it's the flavor I stopped making, ever since the price of vanilla beans went bonkers. I still have a stash from back when there was a market glut, but they're not in good enough shape now for making ice cream. When they were fresh they were total flavor bombs ... no need to add extract. It was possible to go too far and make ice cream that tasted like perfume.

That's interesting. What about cinnamon stick? And ... might it like tree bark because it IS tree bark?

I think the 30% cream will be better. Your idea to just use more cream and less milk is exactly right. Milk and cream have the same things in them. Just different proportions. You may just have to do a little math if you want the results the results to match exactly, or one of us can figure it out for you.

You should also be able to substitute a bit of soy lecithin. You'll need more of it; maybe 1 or 2 grams. It won't give the exact same results but will probably work fine. Make sure you pure lecithin, not some concoction that's sold as a supplement. And make sure it has a mild smell and tastes very bland. I've used Will Powder's version and it's excellent. I don't know why the ChefSteps recipe has so much polysorbate ... it works in minuscule quantities.

A friend who was freelancing at High Times magazine gave some special peanut butter cups to me and my Halloween date many many years ago. The secret ingredient wasn't evenly distributed. One of us experienced some pleasant sensations, the other had a panic attack she thought was a heart attack, and called an ambulance.