paulraphael

I have very little experience with pectin, but after glancing at some of gel cheat-sheets it looks like your problem might be syneresis, which is science talk for weeping. Pectin weeps (and then you, too, weep). Some gelling agents are more susceptible than others. It just means they eventually let some water break out of the hydrocolloid matrix. Pectin supposedly has less syneresis with the addition of calcium; someone here can probably tell you what form to use and how to use it. Additionally, there are other gelling agents that are much more stable. I'm not sure which ones best mimic pectin (or if you'd be interested in other textural properties). It may be possible to stabilize agar with locust bean gum (agar by itself has serious syneresis issues). Possibly also a gel with locust bean gum and iota carrageenan.

Here are some other sources I've found recently ... they get into some of the unknown unknowns. cp Kelco Pectin Book cp Kelco Carrageenan Book cp Kelco Gellan Bookcp cp Kelco Xanthan Book And ... the tech support people at both kelco and TIC gums have always been amazing when I've called.

I'll bet you hit it on the head, and it just took the freezer a long time to recover from defrosting. It can take a fridge / freezer 24 hours just to stabilize after changing the thermostat setting. Not sure why it takes so long. Ideal freezer temperature is a tricky issue, since at home we use the same freezer for hardening, for storage, and for serving. According to Dr. Cesar Vega, the ideal hardening cabinet is -33°C / -27°F. Most actual hardening cabinets are -40, and conventional wisdom is that the colder the better, but Vega says (somewhere) that if you freeze ice cream too cold, the water turns to water glass, rather than crystalline ice, and this can lead to large crystals forming when it warms up. But most of us don't have to face this problem. For storage, he says typical ice creams are completely stable at -25°C / -13°F or below. Ice crystals won't grow, because all the water is solid. For serving, standard practice is -14 to -12°C / 6 to 10° F. Ice cream shop scooping cabinets are probably somewhere around there. Too warm for everything else you use a freezer for. In my experience, -20C / -5°F worked well for everything. It was the coldest my old freezer would go, so I couldn't compare lower temps. It hardened the ice cream quickly and gave great texture, and the ice cream only took a few minutes to soften after you pulled it out. The only drawback I found was energy use. It wasn't the newest of fridges and you could tell it was cycling on a lot. Edited to add I've looked into the idea that a hardening cabinet shouldn't be colder than 33°, and don't think there's anything to back it up. In order for water to form a glass (amorphous ice) it has to freeze to a temperature lower than this in milliseconds. Which is not going to happen when you put a pint container into the freezer. This is something you might think about when making liquid nitrogen ice cream (and it's the whole idea behind dippin' dots). Probably the conventional wisdom is right, and colder is better in a blast freezer.

Ahh, interesting. Are they actively developing it? I hope they keep it a generally useful tool and don't find a way to bind it to some proprietary technology. Edited to add: based on iTunes store reviews, it sounds like they rebranded it and changed the color from yellow to red.

Not sure if anyone's mentioned it upthread, but one of the best and cheapest accessories is the S.V. Dash app. Rather than using generic recipes or tables, it lets you pick your own target temperature, and find a time based on the real dimensions of your food. Sadly the developer hasn't touched it in the last two years, so its future is uncertain. I'm hoping Anova or someone buys it. I wrote a tutorial on how to best use the app here.

Freezer problems are a drag. The freezer in my old place could be set to -5F / -20C and hold it comfortably. My current freezer struggles to maintain -1F / -18C, and it makes a big difference. Even with all the improvements I've made in my formula, it's hard to get the ice cream as smooth as it was with the better freezer.

100% the latter. By evaporating water, you're increasing both the nonfat solids and the fat. There is possibly some effect from denaturing the whey proteins, but I don't believe you're going to notice it in these recipes. Mainly because they are very heavy on egg custard, so they have more than adequate added emulsifiers already. There is some research suggesting that with prolonged cooking, whey proteins can aggregate with casein proteins, forming a hydrocolloid with thickening / stabilizing ability. But this seems difficult to accomplish. Even Jeni Britton-Bauer of Jeni's Splendid—who's a pioneer in using milk proteins as emulsifiers in egg-free ice cream—adds starch as a stabilizer. If you want to increase the fat and nonfat solids of an ice cream, evaporation is a way to do it. But you'll have an easier time and get more consistent results by just using a higher percentage of cream and dry milk. In my experiments, cooking milk proteins to varying degrees in a formula that's lower in fat and much lower in egg yolk than Ruben's formulas, I find the effect to be extremely subtle. It's likely that you will only see any effect if you're using milk that's been pasteurized at low temperatures (and dry milk that's been spray-dried at low temperatures). Edited to add: There's something I'm leaving out. The differences aren't 100% evaporation; some of the difference is from adequately thickening the egg custard. Contrary to what used to be taught in cooking school, custard consistency is a factor of not just concentration and temperature, but also time. An egg custard brought to 162F for two minutes will thicken very little compared with one held at that temperature for 15 minutes. Dr. Cesar Vega confirmed this in tests done with a rheometer.

I don't know what goes into the manufacture of dried pasta. It definitely seems like more than just durum semolina and brass dies, because many brands use those and their products aren't equivalent. Based on the amount of flavor in the good pasta, I'm assuming there's some aging that goes on. The semolina flour itself might be quite variable. And the coarse dies themselves don't seem equivalent. Some of the pastas have much more mountainous, irregular surfaces than others.

I'd recommend a standard sorbet stabilizer. Ideally you want one without dairy (you want it to stay sorbet-like. You can always add dry milk powder to ingredients that are especially low on solids, like citrus) and without gelatin (which works great in sorbets, but people expect them to be vegetarian). The ingredients you mention mostly add solids and bulk, and emulsify some oil. I'd try something that uses hydrocolloids that form a gel. The mix will get pudding-like when it chills, and then you blend it to break the gel and freeze it in a machine. It will have more creaminess and body than an unstabilized sorbet, and a lot less iciness. This formula's an idea based on a couple of previous experiments I've done (but I'm not finished with this project yet ... so there's probably room for improvement). 4: 2 : 1 : 1: Locust bean gum : guar gum : lambda carrageenan : kappa carrageenan Use between 0.2% and 0.3%

Of note in Carlton's example recipe, the stabilizer blend is designed to form a gel, which is part of what gives body and whipability to a 6% milkfat base. Kappa carrageenan gels in any dairy product (from the calcium) and xanthan and locust bean gum gel when combined. After you age this mix, it will probably be like pudding; it may need to blended to convert to a fluid gel before pouring into a machine. This particular blend seems like it would be ideal for a soft serve ice cream; I wouldn't recommend it for regular ice cream.

It just seems to me that evaporation is a bug and not a feature. I don’t see how it’s possible without elaborate measures to simultaneously control evaporation and the the degree of cooking. The rate of evaporation will vary not just with temperature, but with the size and shape of the vessel, the quantity of mix, the rate and type of stirring, and the ambient temperature and humidity. So if you’re cooking to a set time/temperature, the evaporation will vary. If you cook to a set evaporation (by stopping and measuring frequently?) the cooking time will vary. If you want to increase milk solids, add nonfat dry milk. There are zero downsides. Use a good brand and it will be pure skim milk, spray-dried at a lower and better controlled temperature than what you’ll ever manage in the kitchen. There’s a reason that most of the best pastry chefs do it this way. If I didn’t do sous-vide, my first choice would probably be a lab hotplate, with a pan lid drilled for the thermocouple probe. Edited to add: 1° accuracy should be more than good enough for ice cream. Is there a way to cover the KA heated bowl while it's working?

By weight, maltodextrins have between a tenth and a third the freezing point suppression of sucrose. And they're not sweet. So yeah, not helpful. Stabilizers will probably be very useful in these ice creams, but as you've said, they're not the solution to the freezing point issue. Since a lot of the sweeteners in question here work in small quantities, and since people are even talking about reducing the lactose (so no added milk solids) the ice creams will have low solids levels / high water levels. This means they'll need extra help to slow the growth of ice crystals and to have good body.

I don't know why more people don't use an immersion circulator for ice cream. Precise, repeatable, and if you don't already have one, you need one! I haven't made ice cream any other way since I've bought mine. A Thermomix looks like it would d a good job too, but I've never used one (they don't seem so common in the U.S.). And a lab hotplate with magnetic stirrer and thermocouple should be great, but those are expensive compared with the more conventional options.

I just wrote a long post about ice cream stabilizers, including information on customizing your own blends. This is pretty heavy going but I hope helpful for anyone who's been struggling with the topic. There's a lot of information here that you won't find elsewhere.

Yeah, I'm equally in trouble with my girlfriend for making ice cream and for not making it. One thing I find that helps with the whole addiction / binge thing is making it with intense flavors ... ones that really bloom in your mouth and evolve and slow you down. We find these ice creams satisfying in much smaller doses.

Good dry pasta tastes nutty and grainy to me. Not too far off from artisan bread or pizza crust. Edited to add ... Why don't you order a package of Setaro, and then you can see if I'm out of my mind or not.

Good pasta is flavorful. You won't taste it if it's slathered in marinara sauce, but it definitely makes a difference if you're having a more minimalist preparation. I have to make a special trip to get the best pasta, and so usually reserve it for dishes where the flavor will shine through. Think of it like pizza crust. With a good neapolitan pizza, the edges of the crust are often the best part. The part with the sauce and cheese is more like the appetizer.

I haven't, and I apologize for not noticing their names here. I'd only noticed mention of barilla, de Cecco, Ronzoni, and Muellers, which are all pretty flavorless and generic stuff.

Jo, I'm looking forward to your report on the KA heated bowl. I mention it as a possibility in my ice cream series, but you're doing the original research. Also, please advise re: 'well deserved zombie' and all repercussions

I think we've been conditioned to not expect flavor from pasta because we've gone our whole lives eating flavorless pasta. The first times I heard people talk about delicious bread, I had no idea what they were talking about. I'm convinced this is why we think of pasta as kind of neutral substrate for sauce. I'd encourage everyone to mail order a package or two of the Setaro. Cook it and just toss it with a little olive olive oil and black pepper, maybe some fresh parm. It should become clear why the Italians think of sauce as a condiment rather than the main event.

Dan Aykroyd had that idea 40 years ago!

Yes, Jo, we all envy your homogenizer! Re: pasteurization ... for most non-industrial purposes we can just call it cooking. There are several reasons to cook the mix. When making ice cream at home pasteurization is not usually an important one (assuming you're starting with pasteurized milk and cream).

That's a good question, and the answer is yes, you'd lose the benefit. But ... the benefits are very small, and the milk solids in the cream are a small portion of the total milk solids in a well designed recipe. For example, in a recipe that's half cream and half milk, if you add enough nonfat dry milk to get the milk solids up to 10%, then the milk solids in the cream are just 23% of what's in the recipe. That said, I haven't tried it both ways and compared side-by-side. My guess is that the differences would be very small.

Absolutely. It's apples and oranges. I like making fresh pasta from scratch; it's marginally better than what I can buy from specialty shops, although I don't have the tools / patience to make anything besides lasagne or paparadelle. So I'm perfectly happy to buy really good fresh pasta. And sometimes even halfway good versions. As far as dry pasta, I don't think any of the brands mentioned here is very good. None has much flavor. Of the brands available at supermarkets in NYC, there's occasionally something that looks like it's made from quality durum wheat and extruded through rough bronze dies. One is DeLallo, which Whole Foods carries. I forget the others—but these are just halfway decent. They differ from De Cecco and Barilla and Ronzoni etc. by having real flavor, and texture that's more satisfyingly pasta-like. The only great pasta I can find comes from specialty shops. There's a brand called Setaro available at Buon Italia in Chelsea Market. Fortunately you can order online. This is as good as any I've had. Everything I've bought from Eataly has been first rate also. I can't remember what brands I've had there—I usually go for what looks good and isn't too stratospherically expensive. It's a drag that you have to go such lengths for f'ing noodles in this country. At list the internet exists!

The only issue with cooking prime rib s.v. is the size. The process suits itself better to rib steaks. If you try to s.v. a large roast, by the time the center reaches final temperature, the meat on the outsides will have been cooking long enough to lose moisture and to get mushy. For a cut this tender, you generally want to cook until done and hold for as little time as possible (or until pasteurized). I think 10 hours is way too long for optimum texture. This cut doesn't want to be sv'd for much longer than 2 or 3 hours. What size cut are you talking about? Is there a possibility of cutting it down to more steak-sized portions (under 2")? If it has to stay whole, I'd be inclined to roast. You can't get the perfection of s.v., but doing in two stages ... long and low, followed by browning at 500 or 550, you can come quite close.