paulraphael

Mitch (Weinoo) was just telling me about this machine. I'd suggest seeing if any reviewers report how much overrun it generates. The older, popular Whynter machine supposedly spun fast and made fluffy ice cream. If this machine is similar, make sure you're ok with that.

That's impressive. Much faster than I've seen reported elsewhere.

I've never had ice cream made with raw milk, but have hesitations about the whole idea, separate from the safety-related ones. Uncooked milk proteins behave very differently in an ice cream than cooked ones. When the proteins are denatured by the right degree of cooking, they take on new properties that are helpful in terms of texture and emulsification. One flavor test that I've done is between milk and cream from a small dairy (pasture-fed cows, low-temperature pasteurized—delicious milk and cream) vs. dairy from the supermarket (the usual ultra-pasteurized industrial farm stuff ... bland, slightly cooked tasting). We made unflavored ice cream with low sugar levels (around 11%) and then did a blind triangle test. No one could tell the difference between the artisanal dairy and the industrial stuff. Meanwhile, anyone could tell the difference by tasting the milk and cream straight. The reasons are that the sugar overpowers the subtle dairy flavors, and that our sense of taste is just less sensitive to cold things (although in this case, we couldn't even taste the difference when tasting the melted ice cream). They did a similar experiment at Serious Eats and came to the same conclusion. I still make all my ice cream with milk and cream from the small dairy. Partly because I want to support the farms, partly because I want low-temperature pasteurization (it allows more control in the cooking process) and partly because I want cream without added stabilizers (unknowable variables). But I'm now quite skeptical of claims that dairy ingredient quality is a factor in ice cream flavor—assuming everything's fresh, and you're not using dry milk powder that's impure or has been allowed to absorb odors.

I use the Kitchenaid attachment. It gets mixed reviews but I think it's great. As with other freezer bowls, how well it works depends on how cold you can get your freezer. The sweet spot seems to be around -6 to -8F. If you chill the bowl 15 hours at those temps and have a well-designed recipe, you can freeze the ice cream in 7–8 minutes. I also like that the mixer has variable speeds, so if you want a little bit more overrun, you can just turn it up a notch or two for the last minute. I've made ice cream at ice cream shops and in pastry kitchens, using things from giant White Mountain rock salt and ice machines (cool looking but awful) to high-end Carpigiani machines (awesome). I've used liquid nitrogen and dry ice in the mixer. I've used those big plastic balls that you fill with salt and ice and give to kids to kick around the yard. I've never used a Paco Jet.

Many disciplines need both a pesky analytical brain and an off-switch.

Really? That's exactly when I ask questions like this. I want to know how to do it. In this case I ask because I want to know what we're talking about—since language like "too sweet" and "too hard" are completely subjective.

This would be even lower sweetness than what I make ... but would be hard as concrete at normal freezer temperatures. You'd have to warm it to over 20°F to get it scoopable. Some people are ok with doing this. Blending different sugars just lets you control these qualities independently.

Exactly. There's a lot of fighting for freezer space around here already.

I can't speak from any testing experience, but I'm quite skeptical of affordable compressor machines. The most important aspect of freezing ice cream is speed, and these machines often take 45 minutes or more. It's possible to make smooth ice cream with a 45 minute residence time, but you're doing it in spite of the machine, not with its help. Another thing to consider is the long-term outlook of a cheap refrigeration compressor. How long will the thing likely go before it breaks, and is it even serviceable? The nice thing about freezer bowl machines—if you're lucky enough to have a powerful freezer, that you can set to several degrees below zero F—is that you can get a lot of freezing power out of them. The downside, as you suggest, is that they're a pain in the ass. I use a freezer bowl at home, and suspect I'd need to spend a couple of thousand bucks on a compressor machine that would outperform it. This is because it's got a massive bowl, and my freezer can go really low. But like you, I'm stuck with making one batch a day.

How much sugar per 1000g?

Is your preference based on a fair comparison, or is it based on ideas? I made David Lebovitz's recipes for years. And gradually found ways to improve the texture and the purity / intensity of flavors. My proposition is this: if you tell me the qualities you like in an ice cream (sweetness, hardness at a certain serving temperature, flavor qualities, textural qualities) I believe that I could design a recipe, using a wider palette of ingredients, that you'd prefer in a blind taste taste test. Whether you or anyone likes the idea of these ingredients is a completely different conversation.

I use the stabilizers and emulsifiers (either egg yolk or pure lecithin) even if the ice cream will get eaten in a day. They simply improve the texture and body. If you have a professional ice cream machine that can freeze a batch in a few minutes—or if you use a Paco-Jet—you won't need stabilizers to get tiny ice crystals. But you might appreciate the ability to tailor the texture to your exact preferences. Emulsifiers about about getting a robust foam structure that has a nice texture and that doesn't collapse too quickly. Egg yolk is a great emulsifier, but you want something else for recipes where eggs aren't appropriate.

I do it to make the ice cream better. I can get smoother textures, better mouthfeel, better body, and better resistance to becoming icy in the freezer, if I go beyond the basic ingredients. Using sugars beyond table sugar lets me independently control the sweetness and hardness of the ice cream. I think most ice cream is too sweet—so sweet that it mutes the flavors I want to be highlighting. But just reducing the sugar turns ice cream into a brick. So I blend alternative sugars. I use gums. Because I believe you can make much better ice cream with them than without them. Every Michelin 3-star pastry chef whose ice cream techniques I've studied feels the same way. I use skim milk powder. Because milk and cream don't have enough milk solids to give the kind of body and other characteristics I want. I resisted it for years because it sounded gross. Now I think it's the single best thing you can add to ice cream. I've done blind triangle tests; if the milk powder is good, no one can taste it. But everyone appreciates the texture improvements. In sorbets I use a whole litany of unusual ingredients with unappealing names. Because every sorbet I've had from traditional recipes has been disastrously too sweet. And the texture has always been disappointing. My ingredients let me make sorbet with 75% fruit—double what I've seen anywhere else. And the sweetness is just enough to complement the fruit, and the texture is like silk. I made ice cream for years using nothing but old fashioned pantry ingredients. I pushed the quality as far as I could, but never got it as far as I wanted. Opening my mind to new ingredients and techniques made it possible to take things to a whole different level.

I'm not suggesting that all ingredients are equal, just that the "natural" vs. "chemical" distinction is almost always both meaningless and useless. For one thing, when I ask people what these chemicals are that they're worried about, it's usually gums (guar gum, carrageenan, locust bean gum). These are no less natural than anything in your kitchen. Guar gum is flour made from a legume. Locust bean gum is flour made from a tree seed. Carrageenan is rendered Irish moss seaweed. Table sugar is more processed than any of these ingredients. Chocolate is more processed than just about anything. Many ingredients that sound "chemically" to people are just sugars. Dextrose is just glucose. It's flowing through your veins right now, keeping you alive. Fructose is another sugar, found in fruits and all over the natural world. Invert syrup is the primary component of honey. Atomized glucose is glucose syrup that's been dried into a powder. Trehalose is a less common, but naturally occurring sugar. Inulin is a large-molecule sugar extracted from chicory. So I end up thinking that by "chemical," people mean an unfamiliar ingredient. This is just closed-mindedness—although I get that "gum" isn't an appetizing word. This is a PR problem, not a culinary one. There are some ingredients that can be helpful in ice cream that I can understand calling "unnatural," because they have been so significantly altered from their natural precursors. I don't know exactly where you might draw the line, but carboxymethyl cellulose (cellulose gum) and glycerol monostearate (a lipid used as an emulsifier) aren't things I'd call natural. But they're also harmless. And if they are chemicals, they are chemicals in the exact same sense that water is a chemical. For perspective, many natural things are not harmless. Consider hemlock. Radon. Shellfish toxin. Botulism. You're more likely to die from the saturated fat in the cream than you are from cellulose gum.

Homemade tomato juice sounds like a real upgrade. One problem I have is that even fancy / delicious brands of tomato juice typically have way too much salt. It's one reason I usually skip the celery salt.

I hate to break it to you, but every batch of ice cream you've ever made was 100% chemicals. And many of the ingredients with scary sounding names are every bit as natural as anything else you'd put in ice cream. Many of them aren't even processed as much as table sugar.

How can you make coffee without a thermometer?? Madness!

You're describing ice crystals, and it's true that it's challenging to eliminate them in homemade ice cream. How long is the residence time in your ice-100? Anything longer than 20 minutes is a slow freeze, which will encourage noticeable ice crystals. Given a long freeze time, your weapons against crunch are formulation (and yours looks very good), dasher design (I know nothing about this machine), and stabilizers. Did you say earlier you were using a stabilizer blend with xanthan gum? I think you'll see improved results if you switch to locust bean gum. Xanthan is wonderful stuff, but it's not particularly gifted at ice crystal suppression. LBG is a wunderkind. For whatever it's worth, I do all my home ice cream making with the freezer bowl attachment for a Kitchenaid mixer. I think it cost $80. It has massive quantities of freezing gel inside. If I can pre-chill it at least 15 hours in a freezer set to -21°C / -6°F, it freezes ice cream in about 7-1/2 minutes. I aim for a -6°C drawing temperature. This is almost as fast as a $20,000 Bravo or Carpigiani machine. Of course, I can only do 1 quart a day with this setup, so it won't meet everyone's needs. But if you had the freezer space and were willing to spring for multiple bowls, you can get pro quality with minor inconveniences. Getting the freezer temperature just right is key. At 0°C, residence time is closer to 20 minutes. At -24°C, the mix freezes solid almost instantly and stalls the dasher. It's possible that any freezer bowl machine could kick ass like this if you dial in freezer temp, but I don't have experience with others. No idea how strong the motors are or how well the dashers are designed. Anyway ... I'd try monkeying with the stabilizer first. You have a good basic formula.

The best I've had is from Coffee Mob in Brooklyn. The owner's a friend and in my opinion a brilliant roaster. Or maybe we just like the same flavor profiles. In the same league and more famous is Equator Coffee in San Francisco. If you buy from either company, take the time to get your brewing technique just right. And make sure you have a decent grinder. These coffees are expensive, and it's a waste to treat them like supermarket coffee. I only make these coffees on weekends and occasions. It's more money than I want to spend on a daily drug, and more effort than I want to spend on a workday morning.

I love the classic with horseradish and celery salt. Worcestershire is non-negotiable. I don't like Tabasco; I substitute a hot sauce I enjoy. But I often don't have horseradish, and rarely have celery salt. I've found sriracha to be a fine substitute. Spice and garlic in place of horse. We also came up with an Indian-inspired version with fresh ginger, mango chutney, and cardamom, that we absolutely love. The Bloody Masala. I've enjoyed bloodies made with gin, but prefer vodka. It's maybe the only thing besides infusions I use vodka for. Always, always, whatever's cheapest at the liquor store. I'd be astonished if anyone could tell the difference between any two unflavored vodkas in a bloody mary ... in a blind triangle test.

We're just talking about it seeming too hard-frozen, yes? If this is the only problem, I'd just change the ratio of sugars. More dextrose, a little less sucrose. Is your freezer very cold, and you don't want to wait to be able to scoop? There are some drawbacks to going for too much freezing point depression. It will mean that at storage temperature, a lot of water remains unfrozen, and is free to move around and make bigger ice crystals. This is why we set things up so the ice cream has to warm up when it comes out of the freezer. My first troubleshooting step to fix the sandiness would be to add just a bit of carrageenan. I wouldn't expect this to be necessary, but I can't think of anything else. Your formula is very similar to what I use most often, except for the stabilizer details, and I've never encountered sandiness or a short texture.

That dry texture your describing may be going on at the level of the water / fat emulsion. You don't have too little water. You've got about 40% total solids, whch is great if you like a lot of body. You've got about 14% milk fat, which most people would find close to ideal in a vanilla ice cream. The high solids level would tend to promote a more luxurious, or even elastic texture than what you describe, which is why I find your results surprising. More water / lower solids will just encourage iciness and give a thinner body. If it also solves this texture problem, then I'd say that you've found a workaround, but haven't really solved the root problem—which is something I'm really just guessing at right now. Edited to add: one way to use inulin for health purposes is to put it in your smoothie, and eat less ice cream

The basic idea is that in an unstabilized solution, you can have problems if the milk solids non-fat concentration is greater than 1 part in 7 parts water. This is a very loose approximation; there are many other factors. The water activity of other dissolved solids is one. Temperature is another. Solutions are more stable at lower temperatures, BUT ... because of fractional freezing, the concentration of msnf goes up and up and up the more hard-frozen the ice cream is. So the temperature relationship is completely non-linear. Corvitto's formula is an even more vague approximation than the 1:7 rule, because there are sources of msnf besides milk powder (like, milk and cream). And because there are solids besides fat and sugar. So with his equation, in addition to using a rather rough general principle, you're just guessing at the quantities of both msnf and water. But happily, the shortcut is very simple: if you use stabilizers, you shouldn't have to worry about any of this unless you're trying to do something extreme.

Intersting. I don't know why you're having texture problems. It looks like a very well-balanced formula. I'd also expect it to be relatively soft at normal serving temperatures. The "standard" maximum nonfat milk solids level for this would be 8.5%. You're at 12.3%, which shouldn't be a problem, considering the stabilizers. Here are the other numbers: Total Fat: 14.7% Milk Fat: 13.7% Total Solids: 40.4% Solids Nonfat: 25.8% Milk Solids Nonfat: 12.3% Acidity: 0.2% Alcohol: 0% Stabilizer/Water: 0.26% Egg Lecithin: 0.34% POD: 130 / 1000g PAC: 254 / 1000g Absolute PAC: 535 / 1000g (these PAC values don't mean much) Rel. Hardness @ -14°C: 72 (normal values are between 70 and 75) My only recommendation would be to add a bit of carrageenan. Like, a really small bit. 0.2g lambda or 0.1g kappa. This is a semi-wild guess, based on what you're telling me. I wouldn't have thought this would be necessary, but you're finding that something isn't right. How cold is the freezer?

Wow, I forgot I'd started this thread. I no longer live in the mouse-infested former-brewery, but did manage to get rid of the mice. Here's what worked: Getting rid of the filthy housemates who caused the problem in the first place Traps. The humane electric one, and lots of conventional ones. Exclusion. Stuffing holes with steel wool. Containing food in mouse proof things as much as possible. And cleaning up religiously. Cat. Between when the problem started and when it ended, a kitten showed up in my life. He was a ruthless serial murderer. No mouse could get away. Recommended with reservations, because he drew out the process as long as possible. Possibly the mice just packed up and fled after witnessing the torture. I did not enjoy this process, as effective as it ultimately was.