paulraphael

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.

I recently shopped for cinnamon oil to make some xylitol candy. My girlfriend had bought some, it was really cool, but also way too expensive ... so we decided to make our own. The health food store had real cinnamon oil and and also "cinnamon" cassia oil. I know that cassia isn't the real stuff, and probably isn't as good ... but I'm under the impression that cassia is what they pass off on us as cinnamon most of the time, and it cost less than a third what they wanted for the real cinnamon ($8 vs $26—and this project was all about being a cheapskate). I wish I could do a side-by-side comparison. The cassia oil isn't bad, but it's kind of weird. It tastes like there are lot of other flavors going on, as Shain describes. And not in a way I find deliciously complex, like with chocolate or coffee. We're eating all the candy. But each bite is definitely more "interesting" than irresistible.

Talk about burying the lead ... that's a lot of stuff before you get to Cannabis Distillate.

To be fair, lots of people are making vegan ice creams with coconut oil / cocoa butter and nut milks, and some of them are pretty good. This one gets good reviews (I haven't tried it).

I have an ice cream shop client in Kuwait who was unable to find fresh cream (truly!) so he was using a product like this. In his own words, the ice cream was disgusting (I never had the opportunity to try it). We came with a few creative attempts to make it work, but he found all of them terrible. I got frustrated, and stayed up one night writing to just about every dairy in the Middle East. Eventually one of them agreed to supply him with bulk cream. The result: ice cream no longer disgusting. Your mileage may vary!

I stand corrected. I thought law was federal but it's state by state (in NY raw milk can be sold by the farm that produces it). Here's list by state. Please be careful if you decide to work with raw dairy, especially if you're serving anyone who's immune-compromised. This means labelling everything with dates and checking the temperature of your fridge at the location where you'll be storing it.

I'm in.

That's certainly interesting. I'd like to try it someday. It's a mostly moot point in the US; you can't even buy raw milk here unless you're a member of a farm co-op that produces it. Jeni's Splendid used to buy and process raw milk; they stopped after they found the sanitation requirements were just too difficult. They had to shut down and recall their product twice after finding lysteria in the kitchen.

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.