paulraphael

I'd start with an added emulsifier, like lecithin (find a brand that doesn't have a strong taste. Like WillPowder). Then a bit of stabilizer. I like to mix my own. For eggless ice creams, sometimes a little extra lambda carrageenan will give the same custardy mouthfeel as egg yolk.

Vodka will definitely soften the ice cream ... ethanol has enormous powers of freezing point depression. But I don't think adding alcohol is the best solution, because you'll trade hardness for iciness. Alcohol will increase the amount of unfrozen water in the final product, without doing anything to control that water. The most elegant way I know to control hardness is with sugars. Adding dextrose to the mix allows you to control hardness and sweetness independently. Fructose or invert syrup will offer even more control. I've written about this here.

That's an interesting product. It appears to have about 70% the fat content of regular Guanaja. I wonder if other companies make similar versions of their couverture. Here's a sample recipe on Valrhona's site using that chocolate: https://inter.valrhona.com/en/by-your-side/chocolate-recipes/glace-au-lait-p125-coeur-de-guanaja

If I understand the thing correctly, it would be ideal for precision cooking anything liquid. The stirrer would mean you're circulating the food, not just the heat transfer medium. So it would work great for making custards, tempering chocolate, pasteurizing small quantities of anything, and the killer app for me ... cooking ice cream bases.

I don't know about unanticipated. I've been anticipating such a thing for a while, but without any luck. What's unclear to me is the design / purpose of the vessel. Seems like the thing should work with any induction-capable pot on top.

No idea how the upper part of this thing works, or if they'll ever make it. But in principle it's what I've been begging for: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10028609&IDKey=C0D9F4BF5D3D&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%26Sect2%3DHITOFF%26u%3D%252Fnetahtml%252FPTO%252Fsearch-adv.htm%26r%3D22%26f%3DG%26l%3D50%26d%3DPTXT%26p%3D1%26S1%3D(%2522food%2522%2BAND%2B%2522cooking%2522)%26OS%3D%2522food%2522%2Band%2B%2522cooking%2522%26RS%3D(%2522food%2522%2BAND%2B%2522cooking%2522)

Our many decades-old black + decker dumb oven finally burst into flames, so it was time to act. I picked out a couple of great looking sub-$50 toaster ovens by Toshiba and Hamilton Beach, and we were about to pull the trigger, when my girlfriend spotted deep in the reviews that they have mechanical timers that make a ticking noise while toasting. I thought "who cares?" She thought "I'd rather die." So we descended back to the lower basements of the internet for more research. And what did we find but a smaller, less smart smart oven by Breville. The interface is straightforward and pretty intuitive. It has annoying presets ("Pizza") but you can ignore them and just use toast, bake, broil, etc. There's no convection feature, and I don't care. This will be used 90% for toast, and the rest of the time for reheating, for broiling things like croque monsieurs, and maybe for warming plates. I don't need to roast a cornish hen or bake a cake in my toaster. The thing is about halfway between the size of our old toaster oven and the full size ones that will fit a 12" pizza or full chicken. About right for us. The 1800 watt quartz elements cook toast evenly and reasonably quickly. Haven't used it for anything else yet. I'm especially impressed by the design of the crumb tray. Trivially easy to pull out and clean. Its biggest weakness so far is a complete lack of insulation. You could probably make pancakes on the top surface

I spent some time with this book when it first came out and found quite a few head-scratchers that I suspect are editing problems. I don't remember that exact formula. Have you worked out the math and then analyzed the results, to see if they match the intention?

Cheap alloy aluminum pans sit on 30,000 btu/hr burners in restaurants all day long. The worst thing that ever happens is they warp. I'd maybe worry if we were talking about magnesium.

I'd be interested in people's experience with surface treatments. I have an old aluminum griddle that I've seasoned like cast iron, with no special surface treatment. As could be expected, the seasoning flakes off pretty easily. A griddle gets rougher treatment than a pizza steel, but I'd still be curious about ways to improve the durability, either physical or chemical.

Certainly dextrose. Not sure about other non-sugar or non-caloric options. I've never done battle with sweetener crystallization.

Has anyone found a 1/2" aluminum slab for pizza, or priced one from a metal yard? Seems like a good idea. You'd need the slab to be at least thick as your steel (ideally thicker, if you're trying to match the heat capacity) but it would still be lighter. You'd want to season the thing like cast iron, to blacken it and increase its emissivity. Kenji's test of of copper vs. steel showed the copper to be inferior despite much higher conductivity. Uncharacteristically, Kenji made a dubious analysis of what was going on, but if you dig into the comments thread, you'll find some physics-minded people who correctly posit that the difference is in emissivity, and that a pizza steel / stone / oven deck heats primarily by radiation and not by conduction.

I don't believe it's about stabilizers. I think it's combination of cocoa butter (hardening the fats) and extra glucose (softening the frozen portion).

Ok. Here's a paper on using erythritol in ice cream. It says the hardness comes from crystallization of the the erythritol itself; the freezing point depression factor is actually three times stronger than that of sucrose. The suggested compensations are to combine with other sugar alcohols (sorbitol, sucralose, polydextrose). The complete sugar reduction is achieved by taking out the crystallisation inhibiting glucose syrup. However, due to erythritol’s strong crystallisation behaviour, a crystallisation inhibitor is indispensable. Several options from the polyol range were tested in the frame of the project. It was found that sorbitol, maltitol, xylitol and their mixtures, all perform quite well alongside erythritol. It was also discovered that all three indeed soften the ice cream structure. This creates a great toolbox where the polyol pair can be varied to modify product hardness and creaminess. The actual second polyol can be chosen according to individual preference as they all will harmonise with erythritol. Texture as well as sensory analysis revealed that the preferred polyol ratio should be in a range of three parts erythritol to two parts of the second polyol.

I don't know what's going on in your particular formula, but the inverse relationship between freezing point depression and molecular mass isn't just some pet theory of mine. It's a basic principle in chemistry. Chemists actually use it to calculate the molecular mass of unknown chemicals in solution.

Yes, it's exactly what I mean. I like chocolate ice cream with a strong chocolate flavor, which means using lots of chocolate. And this means adding lots of cocoa butter. It can make the ice cream too hard. If you take the usual steps with sugars to soften the ice cream, you can get a kind pudding-like texture that I'm not thrilled with.

I think there's a long, long road between "I don't like bad coffee" and "I'm a coffee snob." There's plenty of perfectly adequate, inoffensive tasting coffee will wake you up in the morning and put a smile on your face, but that won't have the qualities to satisfy an aficionado. Last month I was listening to a podcast by Matt Perger, a former world champion barista and roaster with many opinions (I may be showing my had here, regarding the snob continuum ...). He made an interesting point: tea, wine and beer have histories of many thousands of years, and for most of this time people were concerned with how to make them all taste good. Coffee has only been a beverage for a few hundred years, and almost all the study into making it taste good came in the last fifty. You could even argue that most of it is from the last 20. So coffee snobbery (or enthusiasm, or whatever you want to call it) has only even been an aspiration for a short while. It's new club, and it's evolving quickly. If you're intrigued, be sure to join before climate change wipes out all the good farms.

Sherry vinegars have potential. I concocted a ginger cocktail a few months ago with a bit of pedro ximenez vinegar, and I think it worked pretty well. There are different kinds, with different complexities and balances of sweet/savory/dry/fruity, and with with hints of fruit that range from raisins to pears to peaches.

A pair of heat-mouldable running shoe insoles.

I'm not familiar with pentose or any of its uses in food, but I need to correct what wrote above about sugar alcohols: they tend to have smaller molecules than the more common monosaccharides like glucose and fructose. So they have greater freezing point depression.

Anything dissolved in the water lowers the freezing point. Fat doesn't directly lower the freezing point, but since it doesn't freeze (or at least it doesn't harden to the same degree as water) it softens the ice cream by replacing water that could freeze. We focus on sugars because they have greater powers of freezing point depression than most other ingredients, with the exception of salt and alcohol. This is 100% a property of the size of the molecules. Smaller molecules (quantified as the molecular mass) have greater freezing point depression. This is why glucose and fructose each are more powerful than sucrose, which is a larger molecule made of one of each of the other two. And sugar alcohols, being larger molecules still, are less powerful than sucrose. Proteins are very large, and so are significantly weaker than any sugars. You're dealing with such an unconventionally balanced recipe that we can also look at just in terms of how little water is in there. There isn't enough of it to freeze and properly harden the ice cream.

It used to be made from PVC, which you can spot easily because it smells like a shower curtain. Most home plastic wraps have switched to low density polyethylene, which doesn't cling as well and is more permeable, but which doesn't off-gas and is less likely to leach anything nasty into food. Most commercial cling wraps still use PVC, so if you're watching a pastry chef pull it off of one of those 18" wide rolls, that's probably what you're getting. The biggest concern with cling wrap is the plasticizers that are used to help them cling and to give them the right degree of flexibility. In PVC the most common ones are phthalates, which have known health concerns. Polyethylene itself is inert with regards to food, and if it needs plasticizers at all, they're probably a much more benign crop of chemicals. But we don't really know what if anything is added. Personally I feel pretty safe around saran wrap. I'm not too happy with the idea of wrapping food in PVC and baking it. For what it's worth, BPA is a component in epoxies and polycarbonate. It was never used in flexible plastics like cling wrap.

My understanding is that it's the strong alkaline component of the dishwasher detergent that oxidizes the aluminum. There's definitely a difference between something that's been machine-washed once or twice vs. dozens of times. Sometimes restaurant stores sell used sheet pans for a couple of bucks each, and among them will be ones that were sent through the washer until the aluminum was matte-white, pitted, and coming off in flakes. There's a limit to what you could hope to accomplish on these with some BKF. If you could manage to remove the oxidized aluminum there wouldn't be much of anything left.

I'd think the bigger liability danger would be people doing cook-store techniques without knowing what they're doing. Most home cooks do so much cross-contamination and leave food out for so many hours at the wrong temperatures that it's hard to imagine a circulator adding to anyone's actual peril. In NYC it's the chamber vacuum sealers, not the circulators, that freak out the health dept. They're probably overreacting to something they don't understand, but they require any restaurant with a vacuum machine to implement an HACCP plan. I'd think if the s.v. instructions given by the library just need to advise people to store bags in the fridge for no more than a few days. This and don't cook for more than, say, 2 hours below 131°F. On the one hand it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to consulting lawyers. On the other hand, especially with topics they don't fully understand, lawyers are likely to be very conservative and just advise against everything.

I wonder if klutziness could be a byproduct of being forced to do things right-handed by bad teachers. Maybe this comes up more for certain generations or demographics. A sinister proposition.