paulraphael

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.

I've started work on a whole series of ice cream posts on the underbelly blog. Just the beginnings right now, but over the next few weeks I'd like to get into the nitty gritty of recipe design, including proportions of sugars and designing a stabilizer blend. If you catch any mistakes or if anything's unclear, I welcome your feedback.

In my experience, if you oil a pan before preheating it, you'll fill the house with smoke and end end up with a coating of polymerized oil ... which will encourage food to stick and be very hard to get off.

All the clad copper pans I've seen use three rivets. Not that two wouldn't be just fine, but that's an oddball claim nevertheless. I don't know exactly how Falk phrases their preheating recommendations. For any kind of high heat searing you'll burn the oil if you don't preheat the pan dry (then add the oil, and then add the meat quickly. You've got just a few seconds before the oil smokes and breaks down.) This is just standard searing technique that you'll see used in any restaurant. The very high heat is especially important if the meat is thin, or if you've cooked it sous-vide and don't want to create a gradient. I also don't know the maximum temperature that's safe for clad copper pans, but I've used them in a 550°F oven, and know that they can take the full output of a 17,000 btu/hr range indefinitely. In either case you'll probably see some blue oxidative discoloring on the stainless, but this wipes off easily with some barkeeper's friend. I've never seen this material warp or delaminate. FWIW, I got rid of my tin-lined copper because the tin melted on the fry pans even under what I consider moderate heat (on a not very powerful range) and I wore through the tin in the saucepan with my whisk. I had no interest in retinning this stuff that couldn't handle the techniques I'd bought them for.

It's not such a big deal. I'm sure the consumer brands are fine for most purposes. If you're working with laboratory precision, and demand perfect repeatability from batch to batch, that's another story. I haven't used any commercial stabilizer blends. Every pastry chef I know uses them, so clearly they're good. I mix my own partly as a vestige of my darkroom days, when I learned that dependence on a commercial product sets you up for disappointment when that product gets discontinued or "improved." And also, I wanted to learn about these magic ingredients in a way that I couldn't if someone else was doing the experimenting and keeping the results secret. Because of this, I'm starting to feel like I'm in control enough to vary my blend for different flavors, which feels pretty cool.

Like most gums, guar and xanthan are synergistic, which means they're more powerful together than separate. In other words, you'll get a stronger effect from 1g of each mixed together than from 2g of either of them used separately. This is a feature, not a bug, as long as you're aware of it. It's one reason you usually see two or more gums used together in ice cream or anything else.

Absolutely. This is why chefs often specify a brand. So far I haven't noticed the differences, but I haven't been using gums for the kinds of things that would be sensitive to the most subtle changes. And I haven't done strict a/b tests on them. Right now I have a couple of brands of locust bean gum on the shelf, and in ice cream they seem about the same. For critical stuff, you can also probably expect better consistency from one batch to the next if you buy from the more technical companies, like CP Kelko and TIC gums. These guys publish elaborate specifications and quality guarantees. I bought my last bach of xanthan at the supermarket ... Bob's Red Mill. I would not expect this stuff to be so tightly controlled. Which isn't to say I've ever had a problem with it. I definitely appreciate being able to buy it right down the block.

I hear you. I've got the cool oven blues also. My dough is the best I've ever made, and I love the big hunk of steel, but have reached the limits of my dumb little oven. I'm tempted to burn a pile of wood in there just to see what happens ...

It works fine, but it's not the best. Other gums and combinations suppress ice crystals better, and offer better flexibility with textures. Manufacturers dislike xanthan because it's relatively expensive. A big problem I have with xanthan is that when used in combination with locust bean gum (which is the best among natural gums for suppressing ice crystals) it forms a gel. So after aging, the mix is as thick as pudding. You have to blend it to break the gel and get it thin enough to spin in an ice cream machine, and even then it's thicker than what's ideal.

Manufacturers will give a hydration temperature for their gums that may differ from the generic temperatures you'll read elsewhere. Gum molecules are heterogenous; from any source there will be different versions of the molecules that will hydrate at different temperatures. The gum companies make their formulas by carefully selecting the source and refining for a particular range of molecules for each product. But the hydration temperature they give is still most likely a recommendation. The locust bean gum I use is supposed to hydrate at 80°C. When I asked the manufacturer what would happen if I only cook it to 75°C°, the rep said that probably 90% of it would hydrate. Which is easy (and maybe even unnecessary) to compensate for. But probably at 50°C it would be completely inneffective.

putting it in the fridge for 20 minutes or so should work better than softening it on the counter. Less will melt on the outside. Starches and gums don't suppress the freezing point of the water or effect the hardening properties of the nut oils. These things have to be addressed in other ways.