paulraphael

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.

I'd love for more people to try it. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea ... it's just so different from what people are used to. An artisanal ice cream shop that I consult with tried a less chocolaty version, and his customers found it too shocking. We had to scale back the chocolate/cocoa content a few times before the customers really loved it. His final version was maybe a third of the way between typical chocolate ice creams and mine.

If 23andme can't calculate your ideal recipe, they need to decode some more genes.

This. I've found it helpful to stop short of soft peaks. When you fold egg whites into pancake batter, even though it's a gentle process, it adds a surprising amount of whipping. I use whipped whites in pancakes a lot and have gotten the best results by going just to the point where they start to have some structure. However, I've never gone as far as making batter that's like a souflé. Mine aren't foamy enough to pipe. This may be a trickier project.

You shouldn't have to use more stabilizer. If you're using more milk solids, you might even be able to use less. Lactose controls water really well. The presence of any functional amount of stabilizer seems to avert any crystalization problem. I'd suggest using however much stabilizer gives the texture and other qualities you like. Whatever that is aught to be plenty. For perspective, my most basic formula (which I like a lot) has 12% nonfat milk solids, including 7% skim milk powder. The industry-standard calculation that determine's maximum milk solids for an unstabilized formula (similar to Corvitto's but more sophisticated) says the maximum should be 8.4%. So the formula contains nearly 143% the milk solids it should be able to get away with. I'm using 1.5g stabilizer per 1000g, or 0.15%. Relative to the water in the formula (which is how I like to calculate it) it's 0.25%. This formula has never had a hint of graininess.

I've never had a problem with sandy textures. All the guidelines for maximum milk solids content are based on unstabilized ice cream. With stabilizers in the mix, you increase the maximum by 50%, possibly more ... certainly to a level that you'll never be tempted to test.

Yeah, skim milk powder is about half lactose by weight. The lactose is a major part of what make it effective. If you're trying to reduce lactose it get a bit tricky. I'm not a huge fan of maltodextrin (except in sport drinks) because the glycemic index is so high. One option is trehalose, which has properties quite similar to lactose. Inulin isn't really something I'd use to bump up the solids. It works like a cross between a sugar, a fat, and a stabilizer. I like it in sorbets up to a few percent, but not in ice cream. People use it in very low fat ice creams, if they want them to seam like high fat ice creams. I just use as much fat as I think is appropriate. You could consider using atomized glucose powder. The catch is that you never know what's in it besides glucose ... and it's often a whole lot of maltodextrin and related dextrins. I end up using a fair amount of this in sorbets.

I haven't done any experiments in ice cream, but the really fudgey brownies that I like most get pretty hard and gummy when they're frozen. When I worked at an ice cream shop ages ago, we got brownies from a local bakery. They stayed pretty soft in the ice cream. I don't know what the recipe was, but I asuume they were cocoa-based. They were very sweet, more like a dense cake than fudge, and probably had something like trimoline for shelf life. So pretty much by chance they ticked all the expected boxes.

I think you're overstating your case here. Like Mitch, making great pizza at home has eluded me. But it's because my oven is nowhere near up to the task. The sourdough took just a few months to get right. For what it's worth, all the great pizzas I've ever had were naturally leavened. Maybe I'm spoiled.

I don't understand. What does browning onions have to do with anything? There's no reason to expect browning onions wouldn't work fine in a nonstick pan. You have to finish the job and complete the browning on relatively low heat, and you're not deglazing the pan to make a sauce base.

I haven't used starches in a while. My only thoughts are that cornstarch is traditional, tapioca seems to be the darling these days, and arrowroot is nasty (in ice cream ... it's great elsewhere).

What you're calling chemical additives are just ingredients with unfamiliar names. Inulin is an extract from chicory root. Dextrose is just glucose (if it weren't flowing through your veins right now, you'd be dead). Sorbet stabilizers are blends of gums, which are just flours made from plants like carob tree seeds, guar beans, or Irish moss seaweed. These ingredients are expensive and take up room on my shelf. I wouldn't bother if thought there was another way to make ice cream or sorbet that's as good.

My only problem with the Cook's Illustrated recipe (and practically all sorbet recipes) is that they're way too sweet for me. I mean, instant tooth-ache sweet. I think we've all just learned to accept this over the last 10 million years of sorbet-eating. Typical sorbets are around 30% sugar by weight. Most fruits are 8-15%. Most ice cream is 20% (which I think is already so sweet that it mutes our ability to taste the other flavors). Sorbet's gob-smacking sweetness level exists just for practical levels. Pastry chefs aren't saying "let's blow people's heads off with sugar!" ... they're only trying to make something that doesn't freeze into a brick. So my goal has simply been to tame the sweetness, and maximize the fruit, without any hardness or texture compromises. In fact, along the way, I decided to try to get a creamier texture than the usual short/icy sorbet texture. My approach is similar to CI's but more extreme. I use 75% fruit by weight. The remainder is a blend of sugars and other ingredients that work very hard to suppress freezing point, get the sweetness right, and keep the ice crystals small. The method I think is the same as theirs: blend it all together, chill, spin.

I think you can get there with a bit less effort. Rather than totally rethinking the sugar in your brownies, you can do what many pastry chefs already do for improved shelf life, and substitute 10-20% of the sugar with invert syrup. Buy Trimoline or just make your own. It has high freezing point depression, reduces sugar crystalization, and keeps things moist. You can also make the brownies sweeter than you usually prefer, since we're less sensitive to sweet flavors when they're cold. Scott's advice to add additional cocoa makes sense as well. Other than that, just pick a recipe that isn't very rich. Not a lot of eggs, not a lot of butter or other fat. And one that uses cocoa powder rather than melted chocolate. Which is all to say: brownies that will be boring on their own, but that will add some tasty browniness to the ice cream, and that will be less likely to turn into little bricks. You can use corn syrup instead of invert syrup, but it's not as good. I don't even mention corn syrup in any of my ice cream articles.