paulraphael

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.

Humidity is important. If you have a chiller with a fan blowing dry air, you get giant pieces of jerky. If the air is too moist, you get a mold garden.

If no one knows of a drink by this name, then we may to invent one and send the recipe to Ms. Mitchell. I've heard she's under the weather and might appreciate some cheering up.

I've only heard good things about Watanabe. He has a reputation for great value in a traditional hand-forged knife.

So. It's time to move on to an actual pissing contest. We must include the Tequila Anaconda. Mentioned in what may the best opening line ever, in Joni Mitchell's "Talk to Me": There was a moon and a street lamp I didn't know I drank such a lot 'Til I pissed a tequila anaconda The full length of the parking lot Trouble is, whenever I look up the drink by name, I just get google links back to the song lyrics.

This is unfortunately true, if you're looking at books written for an amateur audience. One standout is Dana Cree's "Hello My Name is Ice Cream." The recipes at least lean in the direction of professional ones. And I'd be strongly inclined to trust Cree on inclusions. I'd be somewhat inclined to trust most of the better authors on inclusions, especially the ones who have pastry chef credentials. This would include Jeni Britton Bauer and David Lebovitz. Nick Palumbo might be among the best sources here; he's all about throwing stuff into the pot, including ingredients you might have to source from Home Depot or your local drug dealer. The recipes were all created by chefs (either Palumbo himself, or some other member of his loose-knit culinary gang).

Looking forward to updates on this. I'd suggest getting some kind of hygrometer and thermometer for the chamber. Refrigerators are really inconsistent, and you'll at least want to know what's going on in there. My butcher from years ago had a makeshift setup in his walk-in. Just a couple of shelves with a fan pointed at them. He had no idea what he was doing ... the meat was always very good, but there was little correlation between age and dry-aged flavors. A few times I hit the jackpot and got the most sublime stuff. Other times I'd buy something aged even longer, that just had a hint of aged flavor. That funny box, along with a couple of instruments, might let you do a more predictable job than he did.

That sounds like the only justification, really. I'm so tired of the plastic police. These people would have heart palpitations if they looked inside any restaurant kitchens (where practically everything, including the the jugs on the Vita Preps, is made of good old fashioned polycarbonate). My problem with the SS container—besides it costing as much as an actual blender—is that you just can't see what you're doing. With a clear container, you can see up and down all the sides, and you know how well things are blending, and if anything needs to shoved into the blades with the tamper.

I'll risk jumping into an arguably pointless discussion, because it might be more entertaining that working on the deadline looming over my head. I think you could objectively test a particular wine against a particular beer for complexity. But how would you test Wine (capital W— meaning the world of wine, against Beer, capital B—meaning the world of beer)? Like most such comparisons, it would likely devolve into a taxonomic one ("that's not really a beer!" "Yes it is!" Which has already started happening upthread). In this case I think we'll find that the definitions of complexity reside in the assumptions and biases rooted in the minds of whoever's doing the comparison. To me this kind of discussion = Not Interesting. We can safely say that the worlds of wine and beer are each massively complex. More than any one person can wrap their head around. For some people, this complexity may increase their enjoyment—but it's already of such a high order that a little more or a little less complexity in either world will make no practical difference. What's the difference between there 100 flavor compounds that you'll never be able to identify, and there being 1000? What's the difference between there being 100 styles of beer you'll never have time to try, and there being 500? There are much more interesting pissing contests to bet on.

I haven't played much with inclusions since I worked at an ice cream shop way back in the 20th century. We just experimented to find what worked and what didn't. I can't remember what we did for things like strawberry shortcake. Some kind of pastry-like thing got thrown in halfway through the cycle. It must have have been pretty firm stuff to not completely disintegrate. Cookies and candy bar pieces worked fine. M&Ms were a disaster ... the food coloring would melt off, the primary colors would mix together, and the ice cream would turn rat-gray.

I've been doing 77°C for 45 minutes. I do this to get the mix closer to 75°C. Sous-vide is an imperfect solution ... it takes a really long time for a bag of goo to get hot. I've almost never had a problem with the bag leaking. For chocolate ice cream I do 85°C (if I remember right). For this I double bag it, just in case. If all goes well, the outer bag stays clean and be reused. Recently I made 2 quarts at once, and since my supermarket was out of the gallon freezer bags, I used a 2-gallon bag. I gave it an extra 15 minutes just on the assumption that it would take longer to heat. It all worked fine.

The real drawback to alcohol is that it softens the ice cream—which means increasing the proportion of liquid water—but it doesn't do anything to help control that water. So you're more likely to get an icy texture. Glucose and other sugars soften ice cream in the same way (and have the same effect on how fast ice cream melts). But they bind to water molecules and help hold them in place. They act like weak stabilizers. Not all sugars have equal powers here. Glucose is pretty good. Fructose (including the fructose in invert syrup) is even better. Ice cream not getting firm enough can be solved by building the right amount of freezing point depression into your formula—whether through sugars or other ingredients. You're looking for the sweet spot. If ice cream melts too fast, it can be for all kinds of reasons. Too much freezing point depression is one of them. So is weak foam structure, which means that the whipped cream component of the ice cream is unstable. This has many causes. It can also be because the liquid phase of the ice cream is too watery, which can be from a low solids content, or from understabilization.

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.

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).

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.

We may need a separate thread for hydrocolloid fantasies.

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.