paulraphael
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Posts posted by paulraphael
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On 11/16/2008 at 7:56 PM, ejw50 said:
I don't think you can know for sure unless you always buy from the same supplier (and assuming that supplier doesn't repackage things from their upstream supplier).
L'epicerie actually asked their suppliers about their composition. It appears 'dextrose' by definition will be pretty much the same, but 'atomized glucose' may depend on who you buy it from.
This is it in a nutshell.
Dextrose = Glucose (typically in the monohydrate form)
Atomized Glucose = a whole stew of stuff.
Typically a modest amount of glucose (the higher the DE #, the higher the glucose quantity)
The rest is other saccharides, probably with a high proportion of maltodextrins, which have big molecules, which aren't sweet, but do present a high glycemic load (so it doesn't taste much like sugar, but it's as bad for you as most sugars).
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On 7/12/2020 at 7:31 AM, ccp900 said:
Hi Paul. Oh I agree about the gigantic work if we want to experiment first hand I’m so sorry pls note that I am not demanding you do all the work for us. I was merely trying to suggest topics hehe
on starches. Personally I would be interested in how to balance them. Are they purely solids or do they affect the viscosity enough that you need to work out the stab emul balance you have. Something like if you make a rice based gelato or even a sweet potato gelato where you don’t just steep but you blend the actual ingredient into the mix
on the commercial suggestion I wanted to clarify what I meant to say was commercial ice creams like for example if we take a Ben and Jerry’s pint what can we guess based on the ingredients and nutrition label
pls do note I am not pushing for you to do those things I was just trying to make suggestions of possibly interesting topics to write about. I hope you didn’t think I was arrogant enough to do that
One thing I'd assume about starches is that they're all different. Refined starches are fairly common stabilizer ingredient. Cornstarch has been used forever, tapioca starch is getting more popular. My guess is that something like sweet potatoes would indeed contribute some starchy thickening. But exactly how much and what the properties are would take a bunch of experimenting. It would probably depend on the variety of sweet potato, how it was cooked, and who knows what else. You'd probably just have to be comfortable with some unpredictability in your textures.
In some cases with commercial ice creams you can learn a lot from the labels. Ben & Jerries isn't especially high-tech (as far as I know). It's basically a New England style ice cream, and all the relevant info is on the label. They use eggs, high solids, and a stabilizer blend with a lot of guar, to get that dense and chewy thing. Other companies (like Haagen Dazs) use technology in ways that are hidden from the label. I believe they do sophisticated cooking steps to turn the milk proteins into stabilizers. Essentially they're using proprietary molecular science to make the label suggest that grandma churned it at home. I'd love to know more about the process, but they're not talking about it.
BTW I didn't think you were being arrogant at all. It's not clear to everyone what's involved in that kind of testing. It's also not clear from my blog that I'm just a guy who makes ice cream a couple of pints at a time ... and who these days eat most of it without help.
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On 7/12/2020 at 12:19 AM, JoNorvelleWalker said:
I sleep with a bag of carrageenan in my bedroom.
We may need a separate thread for hydrocolloid fantasies.
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3 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:
In particular Rose recommends the Ratna brand for mango. She says: "Many canned brands of mango pulp taste more like peach than mango flavor." A quick search shows Ratna is available from amazon and from Indian grocery stores. (But not from amazon.ca.)
The way the recipe is written it does not require ultra pasteurized milk or cream. Not having read much of the book yet, I doubt that anything actually requires ultra pasteurized cream. I could be wrong but I think what Rose is saying is that you can skip heating the bulk of the cream if the cream is ultra pasteurized.
I'm surprised though that you can't find ultra pasteurized cream in Ottawa. It is all but ubiquitous down here. And from what I've read ultra pasteurized cream is difficult to avoid in Canada.
https://edibletoronto.ediblecommunities.com/eat/whatever-happened-pure-cream
In general you'll get better results if you heat the cream along with everything else. This is because the fat globules in the cream need to be heated in order to bind with whatever emulsifying ingredients you're using (lecithin from egg yolk, or whatever). Even if you didn't heat the cream, why would it need to be ultrapasteurized? Any kind of pasteurized is safe enough.
That Edible Toronto article is layers deep in dubious information and conjecture. I'd regard everything it says about carrageenan with healthy skepticism.. Unfortunately the author consulted with a food philosopher, not a food scientist. I'd be very interested in talking to a food philosopher about issues of ethics, free will, the nature of consciousness, or the hermeneutics of Apicius. But when it comes to evaluating a paper written about carrageenan, you need a scientist.
A food scientist might point out that the only modern scientific literature on earth that finds fault with carrageenan has been authored by Dr. Tobacman and her small team. And that Dr. Tobacman hasn't published on any other topic. And that her studies are low-quality. And that she isn't a scientist. She's seems to have it in for a particular seaweed extract that people have been thickening food with for 500 years. But anyway.
Personally, I prefer to not use ultrapasteurized cream, or any cream with carrageenan in it (they put it in low-temperature pasteurized cream, too, because it makes whipping easier). My reasons have nothing to do with safety or conspiracies.
UHT cream has been cooked (very briefly) at a very high temperature, which is hot enough to denature the milk proteins past the point that I think is ideal for ice cream texture. When you denature the proteins to the right degree, they behave as an emulsifier, and help—a little bit—with creamy texture and stability of the ice cream's foam structure.
I don't want carrageenan in my cream, either—not because I don't like it, but because I want to be able to control the quantity. I put in my own carrageenan (and my own guar, and my own locust bean gum, and sometimes my own sodium carboxymethyl cellulose). If the dairy has put gums in there too, I'll never know how much, or if it's the same in this brand as that brand, this week as next week. I want a clean slate. Small quantities matter.
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On 7/9/2020 at 2:20 AM, ccp900 said:
Hi Paul always appreciate your posts there I’ve read your article as well hehe. Waiting for your next one........maybe the effects of starch and starchy ingredients to your balancing....if you use for example potatoes (that doesn’t sound good) or yams and even rice
or maybe even a sort of short masterclass on stab/Emul. Like how to use them for very specific textural effects...for example if you want more chew then a blend of stab 1 and stab 2 would be good
another one is breaking down famous brands using their labels. That could be a good exercise and see if we can break down the ingredients and the numbers into a working recipe as well as explain the components
Hmmm, starches? This hasn't come up. I've never made ice cream with starchy ingredients, and haven't seen anything written on the topic. Did you have something in mind?
Regarding stabilizers, I tried to give a sense in the stabilizer article of how the different ingredients work with each other, and their various qualities. In order to go much deeper, I'd have to do the kinds of experimental trials that I just don't have the resources to do. There are just so many variables, and they all interact.
Even testing and comparing commercial blends ... that's a lot of work. And I'm not especially interested in them. It's so easy to roll your own, and then not terribly difficult to make a variation here or there to tweak your results. It's a fair amount of work, to do this—to experiment to get the results that YOU want. But a monumental amount of work to try to create a guide that tells everyone how to get what they want.
I'd suggest using the standard blend on that page as a starting point. Then one variable at a time you change the proportions, or substitute ingredients.
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14 hours ago, ccp900 said:
Hi!! Welcome to the discussion. Lots of passionate people here and they know their stuff....me I’m a poser hahaha. Anyways can I suggest you getting 2 books. One is the latest perfect scoop. Simply because a lot of reviews on the recipes there are good meaning it will give you good results. The second one which for someone like me is more interesting AND will aid you a lot when you want to start being adventurous and spreading your creative wings is hello my name is ice cream
i think having those 2 is a great combo. Be warned ice cream will drag you and keep you in its tantalizing delicious arms and you will probably end up buying a lot of things!! Cookbooks on ice cream become hard to resist and you’ll end up buying a lot just to see what they can do and how they do it. You’ll prolly look into the jenis books, then van Leeuwen, ample hills, salt and straw, bi rite etc etc etc.
youve been warned!!
I wrote a review of ice cream books, if anyone's interested. The intended audience is people who have already been dragged in deep. Hello My Name is Ice Cream is one of the top picks.
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I got a weird 5lb bag of KA AP a few years ago. I wrote to them and they just sent me a coupon for a free bag. They didn't seem curious about what was wrong. Otherwise I've always found it consistent.
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Mitch is right, you're doing something different, however good it might be.
It's also worth noting that sautéing / deglazing / making a pan sauce is one particular set of techniques among countless others. It happens to be central to how I think about cooking and sauces, but that just reflects my background. The world is full of brilliant cooks and chefs who hardly ever use these techniques. They might have different opinions about pans than I do. You're doing your own version of a pan sauce. I trust you that it's delicious. I'm also pretty sure it tastes different from ones made from fond.
I staged at a high-end sea food restaurant several years ago, one that was especially known for its sauces. I didn't witness a single pan sauce being made in my 2 days there. They cooked about half the fish on teflon, half on spun steel. A couple of dishes they cooked on a cast iron grill pan. Different visions, different styles, different tools.
You're bringing up money ... I haven't shopped for pans in ages, but I see perfectly good looking disk-bottom stainless pans, and even some clad ones for cheap. There's used to be a decent looking line of pans exclusive to K-mart. Another possibility is commercial aluminum pans (just bare aluminum). These work as well as the best ss pans, as long as you're not cooking with very acidic ingredients. And they're cheap and nearly indestructible. The cheaper ss pans probably wouldn't hold up too long to abuse, but you've said that's not an issue for you.
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I've never used those pans, and maybe I don't know what they are. I've used plenty of other non-stick pans (teflon, by many names) and mostly prefer other surfaces for almost everything. Teflon is great for egg cooking (which I almost never do) and it's great for delicate fish with the skin on (but even for this I usually use stainless, mostly just because it's a test of craft ... one I sometimes fail).
You keep mentioning fond. In traditional usage, this is juices that have dried onto the bottom of the pan (stuck) and then browned. Does this happen with your pans? The only time I've gotten a fond with non-stick pans, it's been after the pan was already wrecked and didn't have stick resistance anymore. With healthy teflon, the juices don't stick. They mingle with the fat in the pan. How do you separate them and make a pan sauce?
There's nothing magical about stainless. It's just useful and useable for just about everything. I've also got cast iron, and spun steel, and some old hard anodized aluminum. But when I'm making a pan sauce, I prefer the stainless, largely because that bright shiny surface makes it easier. I can make a pan sauce on cast iron or anodized aluminum, but I won't really know how brown that fond is. Just because the surface is dark. For expediency I do it all the time; it's just not the best tool for the job.
I just looked at the t-fal site to see if they're using some alternative coating. They don't seem to say (which suggests teflon). And they say not to cook with high heat, and that the pans are oven-safe to just 350F. That's not sauté temperature. I have a pretty anemic range, which means pre-heating a pan is more important than if you have 25,000 BTU/hr raging out of a burner. If I'm sauteeing anything substantial, that pan will be around 475 when the food goes in. But even if you've got a powerful range and careful technique, you're probably going to preheat a pan above 400 for a good seer. This breaks down teflon over time. It's why most people's non-stick starts to stick.
I think you can make anything work. And with enough experience, you can develop techniques around your cookware. I'm just not sold on non-stick pans as the best choice for general purpose use, especially sauteeing. The technical reasons people like Mitch and me saute on sticky pans aren't just hot air.
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There are two basic complaints about teflon pans for traditional sauteeing.
One is that you can't really preheat the pan enough to get good browning, without risking damage to the surface. And the teflon does a worse job browning even at the same temperature, because it's a strong insulator, and so slows the transfer of heat to the food.
The other is that the fond doesn't stick to the pan. You get a mix of oil droplets and pan juices floating around together, sizzling and emulsifying. So if you want to make a pan sauce, it's a pain in the ass. What do you do with that glop?
Stainless makes it easy. The fond sticks so you can pour off the extra fat. The bright surface makes it easy to see if the fond is browned adequately (but not burnt). And the deglazing both makes a delicious sauce base and cleans the pan.
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I designed this mango sorbet recipe for a client, who was originally using alphonso mangos:
750g Mango—Alphonso
70g Water
40g Inulin
50g Sucrose
35g Dextrose
50g Atomized Glucose DE30
4.0g Sorbet Stabilizer
1.0g SaltHe's had better luck using a commercial frozen mango puree, and then eliminating the water. I haven't tried it myself (not a huge fan of mango sorbet). If you're willing to roll your own stabilizer with CMC, guar, and lambda carrageenan, and if you have access to erythritol and trehalose, you can improve it beyond what's written here. This was the best I could formulate within constraints.
You won't get great results just substituting mangos in a peach recipe. Mangos are much sweeter than peaches and will throw everything off.
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I don't know about all that. I do know that deglazing a stainless steel pan cleans it up!
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Yeah, I wouldn't buy it just for eating. I certainly eat it straight, like when I've chopped some up for a project ... it's fine. But it's not the same kind of treat as Valrhona, and definitely not the same kind of acid trip as Cluizel.
One of the things pros like about it is the huge variety they make. Lots of different cocoa %s, milks, whites, and specialty chocolates. I usually just got the 60% or 70% and sometimes the 100%. This opens the possibility that you got something odd. Whole Foods often has know idea what they're ordering.
And temper? I don't pay much attention to that in bulk chocolate. The stuff I've gotten usually seems crisp enough. It doesn't have the velvety melt in the mouth of some higher end chocolates.
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22 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:
Fifteen or twenty years ago some friends took me to the new Whole Foods. I came home with Callebaut bulk bin and a feather duster. The Callebaut was the worst excuse for chocolate I have experienced. Maybe excluding Hershey. It wasn't up to the quality of Mars. Now the local Shoprite carries Callebaut. However I am not tempted. Wonderful feather duster though.
I wonder if you got something that was either old or mislabelled, or maybe an odd variety. What was wrong with it? Their chocolates are mostly unexciting, but I've never heard anyone find fault with them. It's a standard workhorse brand for bakers and pastry chefs who aren't able to charge top-tier prices.
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I've always had good luck with the basic Callebaut bulk chocolates for everyday baking. They're a bargain, and in many recipes you wouldn't see much benefit from fancier chocolates. You may be able to buy these in bulk at Whole Foods, if you have one. This was always an option in NYC. Typical price was around $8 or $9 a pound.
For recipes where you can tell the difference, my main chocolates were Valrhona Guanaja 70% and Manjari (64%?), often blended in varying proportions. They complement each other well. These used to cost around double the price of Callebaut. Not sure what they are now. These were also sold in bulk by Whole Foods.
These days for high-end stuff I order from Worldwide Chocolates (better shipping policies than Chocosphere last I checked). I get Michel Cluizel single origins, which are insane. Ones to try are Los Ancones, Vila Gracinda, and their (surprisingly edible) 99%. I think if you try these, you'll understand what the fuss is about. You don't need that much sophistication to hold on to your chair while these flavor bombs blow the top of your head off. But that doesn't change that they're too expensive for most routine baking. I used to fear that the flavors would be too distinctive and weird in most desserts, but this hasn't turned out to be the case. I've used both the Ancones and the Gracinda in chocolate ice cream, and both were amazing. These would be $20 pints if they were commercial. Fortunately they're just a non-profit fetish.
I keep mine in the same strong box as my most important documents, so my girlfriend doesn't get to them. Please don't tell her.
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One detail to add to Hassouni's excellent explanations: up / straight up drinks are usually stirred or shaken with ice, then strained into the glass.
Drinks on the rocks may either be strained off of ice or "built" in the drinking glass.
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The Tawny Orange Negroni:
1. Find some Wilikin & Sons Tawny Orange marmalade. Slather it on toast and bliss out every morning.
2. When you hit the bottom of the jar, resist the urge to lick it clean with your aardvark-like prehensile tongue. Save jar for later. Or just get on with it ...
3. Stir up a Negroni. I like 1-1/2 oz each:
-Campari
-Cocchi Vermouth di Torino
-Ford's gin
4. Strain into dirty marmalade jar with a big ice cube or two. Sip. Forget for the next 5 minutes that we're in a pandemic and the world is on fire.
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1 hour ago, Kerry Beal said:
I've never developed a taste for it!
I'll try making a Brooklyn cocktail to see how well it plays with others. If that doesn't work out, maybe I'll see if anyone in NYC wants to do a booze swap!
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We just got:
-Rittenhouse Rye (starting to learn why people like rye in cocktails)
-Ford's Gin (my new favorite for Negronis, which means my new favorite)-Cocchi vermouth di Torino (my BFF)
-Campari-Luxardo Maraschino (an impulse buy. I see it in so many cocktails. First impression: really disgusting. Maybe 1/4 ounce of it does nice things?)
Edited to add:
We also recently got a special bottling of cask-strength single-barrel Knob Creek bourbon. The owner of our favorite pizza restaurant in the neighborhood needed to pay his bills, and realized he was sitting on a goldmine of booze at the bar. So he's been selling it a bottle at a time and delivering it with chicken soup. This is wonderful stuff ... made the best Old Fashioned I've ever had. He only asked $50. I'll miss this when it's gone.
(Pizza restaurant is scheduled to open again soon ... great news, but I hope he doesn't ask for his booze back).
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I'd be inclined to try flash-chilling by plunging into ice water right after cooking sous-vide. How you reheat for service would depend on how thick the fillets are. I think all your technical challenges will be in the reheating.
If the fillets are thin, you could throw right back into a water bath. Or if you're searing them (I'm guessing you're not) the searing itself might be all it takes. But if they're thick, it will be be more time consuming to reheat them by any method, and more challenging to do so without overcooking / drying them out.
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On 10/1/2019 at 4:25 PM, Hassouni said:
Uigedail is fantastic, so is the standard run Ardbeg 10. In Islay I'm also a big fan of the Lagavulin 8 (and the special game of Thrones release 9 year), as well as the cask-strength Laphroaig 10, though that's a different beast entirely.
I had Uigeadail for the first time over the holidays this winter and absolutely loved it. My dad got two bottles of nice scotch as presents and so we did a very informal blind tasting. I knew one was a special bottling of Lagavulin, and one was the Uigeadail. I liked one of them and was floored by the other. I'd assumed the winner would be the Lagavulin, since I like plain-old Lagavulin more than I like plain-old Ardbeg. But damn if my fave wasn't the Ardbeg.
This was especially good news because the special Lagavulin was a really expensive bottle. The Uigeadail is pretty reasonable, and is available every year. I haven't treated myself to a bottle yet. For pandemic season I've been drinking cocktails, not fancy scotch. Maybe in the fall or winter.
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11 minutes ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:
Yes, last month:
https://forums.egullet.org/topic/152508-home-made-ice-cream-2015–/?do=findComment&comment=2242010
I have a lifetime supply of polysorbate 80.
If I read that right, you used skim milk powder plus reduction. They're both ways of increasing the solids. I'm suggesting you could make life easier and have quite a bit more control of all the variables if you you used milk solids and skipped the reduction entirely.
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Have you tried using skim milk powder instead of reduction? If you get a good brand, it will be low-temperature spray-dried, so basically it will come pre-reduced, but done in a controlled process. You can then choose your cooking time and temperature based just on getting the level of protein denaturing you want. I suspect you'll find the denaturization makes a very small difference—especially in a high-fat, high-solids, high-egg formula.
I'm curious to know what benefits you're seeing from the polysorbate when you've got 4 egg yolks in there.
FWIW, I don't pay any attention to the different flavor profiles of the dominant sugars (sucrose, fructose, dextrose—besides relative sweetness). It's detectable, but I'd really be surprised if anyone would volunteer that they like the taste of 100% sucrose more than, say, 60/40 sucrose+dextrose, if sweetness levels are well balanced. In a food science study, people are probably being fed unflavored, very sweet ice cream, and then being told to choose. The differences are subtle, especially with something cold. Add flavors, and the differences go away.
The ratios of sucrose / dextrose / fructose are all over the place when you compare one kind of fruit to another. I think this is a very minor part of why the fruits taste different. When it comes to choosing sugars, I'm interested in getting the sweetness right (which I think should be lower than just about anyone else who publishes recipes) and getting the hardness right (which varies with preference and your chosen serving temperature).
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7 hours ago, chord said:
In the winter, maple syrup, bourbon, and orange bitters work really well together.
That sounds great.
Maillard and Your Fond
in Cooking
Posted · Edited by paulraphael (log)
Rotus, I'm sure that what you're doing tastes good, but as someone who's used both kinds of pans, I can promise that you're not getting equivalent results.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a thing. If you're trying to make a traditional pan sauce, you don't use nonstick. If you're trying to do something else ... then who knows what's possible.
Have you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Kuhn had some good ideas, but was also a total crackpot. This multipart revenge essay by the great Errol Morris is a more fun read than anything by Kuhn himself. Short version: you'll impress some college fresh-people with paradigm-shift language, but anyone who's really scrutinized Kuhn will roll their eyes.
Personally, I enjoy debunking myths as much as I enjoy deglazing pans. My opinions on the fond topic are based on experience, not orthodoxy.