JoNorvelleWalker
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Maybe not as a main course, but Francisco Migoya in Frozen Desserts (p 340-341) has a recipe for sake and lemon sorbet with wasabi flying fish roe. You could probably substitute your caviar in the recipe, though it wouldn't have the pretty light spring green color.
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Lesson in Freezing Point Depression:
My chocolate sorbet came to a sad, inglorious end. I did defrost my freezer. Tonight is fairly cold, -4 deg C, so I dumped my sorbet and its freezer-mates outside. It completely melted.
Dessert was a warmed slice of munavalgekook (made with almond flour), a drizzle of hazelnut syrup, covered in the quondam sorbet. A fine dessert, to be sure. But not a frozen dessert.
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The nearest town here is about 700 people, but there seems to be a Praxair about 15 miles away. I don't have a vehicle, which makes fetching dry ice impractical, although I see Praxair will deliver.
In other news my cream supply has spoiled, and it seems to be a good time to defrost my freezer.
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In the Alinea cookbook (iirc), they recommend an easy replacement for the anti-griddle:
Simply go to the store and pickup a nice brick of dry ice. Place a kitchen towel on the counter, place the dry ice block on top, and then place a metal sheetpan ontop of that.
Unfortunately neither an anti-griddle nor a block of dry ice are very practical for me: the anti-griddle for price, and the difficulty of dry ice. I've never seen dry ice for sale, and if I did I'd have no way to bring it home.
But dry ice does remind me of the ices and frozen confections of my youth. In the summer at the shore the vendors would store their wares in chests of dry ice. The products were sold very cold. To this day I cannot enjoy a popsicle or similar served at normal freezer temperatures. It just does not seem right.
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Jo, you are a king amongst men, or a queen amongst women if Jo is short for Joanne - my bad.
Many thanks yet again.
You are most welcome, and thanks for the wonderful help you have given me. (Jo is short for Jo Norvelle, I am a girl.)
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If it helps, Migoya has the following recommended min/max percentages for sorbet:
fruit puree (sweet) 40-60%
fruit puree (acidic) 25-40%
dry extracts 31-36%
stabilizer 0-1%
sugar 25-32%
I am really enjoying Migoya's book and it is pretty, as well as informational. Unfortunately he has me wishing for an anti-griddle. I bought a SS hotel pan as the best thing I could think of for hardening my ice cream, and I see that is what Migoya uses in his pictures,
In other news, even after several days, my chocolate sorbet has no iciness!
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I'm sorry you didn't ask the sorbet question yesterday! I just returned Ice Cream 6th edition, Marshall et al that I had on Interlibrary Loan. There was a chapter on sherbets/sorbets/ices with lots of formulation information.
Today I got a copy of Migoya's Frozen Desserts. Haven't read it yet, but maybe there is something in there.
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I've never made chocolate ice cream that I can remember, but the sorbet has the consistency of ice cream, even though it contains no dairy. In my experience milk products tend to dull chocolate flavor (not that I don't love milk chocolate). But this sorbet gives a full bitter hit of intense chocolate along with the lovely mouthfeel of cocoa butter. Not to mention theobromine intoxication. (Says she, sitting here salivating uncontrollably and twitching to herself.)
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Has anyone tried chocolate sorbet? While the idea never appealed to me, I am getting more curious about it since I started making sorbets myself.
The sacrifices one must make for science! Here is my novel, possibly original contribution to the art of sorbet.
The concept of chocolate sorbet had never occurred to me. However another recipe from Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy, one that I had filed away in my mind to one day make, was for mineral water chocolate foam. Now what, I wondered, would result if I froze mineral water chocolate foam? Fortunately I am in the US and sorbets are not a defined food in the United States. My chocolate sorbet can be whatever I want for it to be!
Locatelli's recipe had almost no sugar, and I knew it would not freeze properly. I kept his proportion of mineral water to chocolate but added much more sugar, dash of Grand Marnier, vanilla paste, and a pinch of xanthan gum:
Lindt Excellence 70% -- 100 g
Lindt Excellence 99% -- 100 g
Sugar -- 100 g
San Pellegrino -- 250 ml
Grand Mariner -- 25 ml
Nielsen Massey Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Bean Paste -- 5 ml
Xanthan Gum -- very small pinch
Melt chocolate over warm water. Mix sugar with xanthan gum, and dissolve in San Pellegrino. Bring to the boil. Remove from heat and slowly whisk in melted chocolate. Stir in Grand Mariner and vanilla paste. Pour hot mix into iSi, charge with nitrous oxide, and chill overnight. Discharge foam into prepared ice cream maker bowl and spin. Transfer to cold pan and harden in freezer.
That's all there is to it. I have to say the foam was great by itself but even better frozen. It would be neat to fry it on an anti-griddle, not that that's something that I have. It might work to hard freeze the foam without spinning it.
After hardening texture was just scoopable. Possibly more Grand Mariner would be warranted. I would not want to add more sugar. Gluten-free, probably vegan, what could be more healthful? I keep reminding myself that chocolate is a fruit.
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I have not made a souffle in many years, however I used to get good results from the souffle recipes in Joy of Cooking.
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I'm repeating myself from another thread, but lamb tagine with dates, chicken with apricots and pine nuts (which I had again tonight), pil-pil, chicken mechoui. My chicken with preserved lemons and olives was fairly close to her recipe. (I would not have used a liver if I'd had it!)
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This seems to be the best place to pose this questoin:
Does anybody have sorbet recipes that are really exceptional? And, if so, would you be willing to share them?
Dearly as I love Ice Cream, sorbet's are my particular frozen dessert Obsession. With a capital O.
Don't know if this will help or not: years ago, before anyone around here had heard of Lyme disease, my sons and I had gone raspberry picking. I smushed and scraped the fruit through the aforementioned tamis, and put the puree in the refrigerator. I don't remember what my plans were, but my younger son had the idea to spin it. (We had a good Simac at the time.) The result was rather tart, but one of the more delightfully refreshing things I have eaten. I don't think there was any added sugar.
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But what are they tasting when they taste the cornstarch? Oh well...
Your question made me wonder so I consulted McGee, On Food and Cooking:
"During this wet processing, the starch granules absorb odors and develop their own when their traces of lipids are oxidized, so cornstarch has a distintive flavor unlike that of wheat flour, which is milled dry." (p. 614)
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My freezer temperature, when I checked a moment ago, is -21.1 deg C. I wish I had one that would go to -30! But it could be worse.
I don't know if that difference would account for why my attempt at Jeni's recipe was icy. I may have done something wrong, but considering none of the other batches I've made in the ICE-100 have been unacceptably icy, I tend to blame the recipe. Jeni's recipe has less butterfat than the other batches.
By "scoopable" I mean I can take the ice cream container from the freezer and easily serve a portion. The ice cream is neither too hard nor too soft. In this respect Jeni's recipe was just perfect, similar to the alcohol containing recipes. For other batches I've made, such as the licorice, I have had to warm a serving spade and lean on it with all my weight. In other words, brick hard. Fortunately my weight seems to be increasing.
Darienne, I don't think I said "I don't like the taste of cornstarch in my ice cream," even though I believe I could taste it. The cornstarch flavor did not bother me as much as the alcohol taste in the alcohol based batches that I made. But I would prefer that there not be unintended incidental flavors in my ice cream. Xanthan gum (or maybe one of the other similar gums) should work as a stabilizer in place of cornstarch and not add any taste. I say should, because, except for this last batch of ice cream that I made, my attempts at using xanthan gum have given strange results, such as a salad dressing you could turn upside down and not spill.
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Respin: I wasn't happy with the batch I made from Jeni's recipe. For me iciness in ice cream is a fatal flaw. I melted it down and used my Kitchen Aid immersion blender to incorporate a tiny pinch of xanthan gum (sorry, I do not have a mg scale). I also added more cream. (I like cream.) And I added more vanilla to hopefully cover up the cornstarch taste. Forgive me for not having been more scientific with the measurements.
To my taste the recipe is much improved. It is very good Philadelphia style ice cream. Though having grown up in Philadelphia I don't think people put cornstarch in their ice cream, nor xanthan gum for that matter.
The respun ice cream is still quite scoopable. And very easy to eat. Does it compare with the batch of vanilla I made by the icecreamscience method? No. On the other hand it was not a debilitating amount of work to make.
On an almost completely different subject, I've been reading Giorgio Locatelli's Made in Italy. What should I come upon when I reached page 566 but a recipe for gelato alla liquirizia! Locatelli uses 45g licorice root powder rather than chopped licorice root.
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I've just skimmed through this thread and was surprised that no-one has mentioned 'Frozen Desserts' by Migoya. It's a popular book - perhaps not as obvious as 'The Perfect Scoop' - but it's quite industrial/scientific in it's coverage of recipes and ice cream categories and the use of ratios, and judging from your in-depth discussion I think you would enjoy it.
I had a cheap domestic ice-cream machine many years ago which wasn't much more advanced than the ice/salt buckets used centuries ago. I spent a lot of time and eggs trying to find a way to make lovely soft ice cream at home that didn't freeze into a hard block or have an icy texture. I kinda concluded after a few years of casual experiments that the recipe wasn't nearly as important as the machine. I think ice cream is one area where it's OK to blame your tools!
So my opinion is that if you have a cheap ice-cream machine, I don't think there's much point worrying about the exact temperature the base is cooked at, I think you're facing an uphill battle to begin with. The most important thing to do is get an ice cream machine that isn't complete rubbish.
More recent demonstrations by those with access to liquid nitrogen (or dry ice) tend to agree- the faster you can freeze the stuff the better it will be. Have you tried to source any liquid nitrogen or dry ice?
I've mentioned this before in other ice-cream threads, but part of the reason I bought 'Frozen Desserts' was the hope that it would contain a holy-grail like recipe for ice cream that would have the perfect texture even if made in a cheap domestic ice-cream machine. Unfortunately Migoya basically concluded that the best way to make ice-cream is in a Pacojet, which is fine if you have a few thousand dollars to spare but not much help if your ice-cream machine is at the crappy-christmas-stocking-filler end of the range.
BTW- Pacojet is the answer to LancasterMike's question about success without sugar. It sounds like you can freeze pretty much anything and a Pacojet will turn it into perfect ice cream, but they cost a lot...
Chris, Frozen Desserts was suggested by gap in post #7. I have Frozen Desserts on its way to me via interlibrary loan (annoyingly our library does not have a copy of Frozen Desserts, though we do have Migoya's Elements of Dessert). The current ice cream book I'm reading is Ice Cream 6th edition, Marshall et al. The 7th edition of Marshall is being published this month.
I tend to agree with you about the importance of hardware, not only of the ice cream maker itself but of the freezer used for hardening. For better or worse $233 was more than I should have spent, and I don't know of anything better than the ICE-100 without spending a lot. My previous machine was a Kitchen Aid that was more than $1000, and the ICE-100 is superior on all counts. Liquid nitrogen sounds like a good way to go, but I have not investigated liquid nitrogen beyond checking the prices of dewars! But I wonder, what would be the next step up from what I have without getting into the prices of a Pacojet?
Edit: what machine do you use, if any?
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I've now had two bowls of the Jeni's recipe vanilla and can report. It may sound like damning with faint praise but it was better than I thought it would be. It scooped readily. Consistency seemed appropriate for ice cream. I could not tell that it was made with cream cheese. Melting was as I would expect. I believe I could detect cornstarch in the taste (but then I enjoy eating pastry cream). The finish was clean. Sweetness was more than I care for, but probably about right for normal people.
The major defect was a slight iciness. Perhaps a limitation in my equipment, though not a problem I have had with other recipes. A pinch of xanthan gum would probably cure the iciness, and that way the cornstarch could be omitted.
And of course, as you have guessed by now, I prefer a richer tasting ice cream.
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I'm sure you're right, but I don't have one...
I confess I have not used mine since two ice cream makers ago. However it is wonderful for raspberries!
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Jo,
Jeni's original recipe does not taste like cheesecake at all, it uses much less cream cheese than you used so that may explain the weird taste. I have made at least 10 different recipes, maybe more and all turned out great. Dark chocolate one had a deep and rich chocolate flavour without being too sweet (for my taste) and my absolute favourite was brown butter and almond brittle. Sugar plumped fruit recipes are good but can be sweet.
I cannot wait my machine to be working again!
I just got up from the computer to go find Jeni's book, forgot what I was doing, and came back with a bowl of ice cream instead. But now I have her book in front of me. I agree I did not give her book a fair try, so after dinner I prepared a batch of Ugandan Vanilla Bean Ice Cream (pages 148-149) as accurately and as close to the recipe as I could.
I hope it does not violate any rules to list the ingredients:
2 cups whole milk
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon cornstarch
1 1/2 ounces (3 tablespoons) cream cheese, softened
1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
2/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
1 vanilla bean, split, seeds scraped out, seads and bean reserved
I had to make some substitutions: Kosher salt for fine sea salt, Karo for light corn syrup, and NM Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Bean paste for the Ugandan bean.
The mix is chilling now.
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A blender works better, but in either case I would then use some elbow grease and strain through a chinoise.
I think a tamis would be easier than a chinoise.
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I used about 30 gm chopped licorice root. The brand is Frontier. The milk was about 60-70 deg C. (I did measure the temperature, but with an old analog thermometer.) I put the licorice and the warm milk in the iSi, pressurized, and let sit for about 30 minutes. I then strained the milk before adding to the creme anglaise.
I pressure infused in the iSi because I had the iSi. If I do this again I plan to leave the licorice in the creme anglaise while it cooks for an hour. Different flavor components of licorice are more or less soluable under different conditions. Alcohol infusion might get more flavor. My ice cream had a nice licorice taste without being overwhelming.
What were your experiments?
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I have now read Jeni's Splended Ice Creams at Home, that Bojana mentioned. Jeni uses cream cheese, corn syrup, and corn starch in her mix. No eggs. I didn't follow Jeni's recipe -- for one thing I don't have corn syrup without HFCS that she specifies. But I made a batch of peach ice cream using cream cheese in the mix, with the following recipe:
Frozen Peaches -- 280 gm
water -- 50 ml
heavy cream -- 500 ml
sugar -- 140 gm
cream cheese -- 113 gm (4 oz)
vanilla paste -- about a teaspoon
almond extract -- 1/4 teaspoon
I cooked the frozen peaches in water to give about 225 ml fruit mixture. I processed this with heavy cream, sugar, and cream cheese, added almond extract and chilled over night. Next day I stirred in vanilla paste just before spinning. The mix was the texture of soft serve even before adding to the ICE-100. I was pleased and surprised that the ICE-100 would even handle a mix so firm, but once I gave the dasher a push by hand, it worked just fine. I spun for 15 minutes and hardened in the freezer for about 12 hours.
It tastes OK. It is a frozen dessert, though I'm not sure I would call it ice cream. The taste and texture is that of a cream cheese cake with little bits of peach. Not a bad cheese cake either, but not quite what I was hoping for. Certainly not what I would call peach ice cream. For one thing it doesn't melt. Somehow I doubt Jeni uses cream cheese in her commercial ice cream. On the positive side, it is not icy at all.
Disclaimer: I was not following a Jeni recipe and this strange result should not reflect on Jeni or on Jeni's book.
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Tonight I made an espuma of bearnaise in the iSi. I am proud of my bearnaise and make it fairly often in cooler weather. The bearnaise turned out perfect. I was disappointed that the espuma, though quite good, really did not add anything either to the flavor or to the presentation.
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I just finished two large bowls of the licorice ice cream. I am surprised at how good it is. It does not have the funny taste I reported for the mix, though there is a residual sweetness after one stops eating. The texture is not quite as silky as the vanilla I also made by Ruben's method, probably because there is less fat this time and much less sugar (to account for the glycyrrhizin). Fortunately the total sweetness is just right for my taste.
I wonder if I could play with the parameters of extraction and get less glycyrrhizin and more paeonol and ambrettolide?
Home Made Ice Cream (2013– )
in Pastry & Baking
Posted
Here is the blog and recipe that I started with:
http://nami-nami.blo...ake-recipe.html
As I recall the nami-nami author is a poster on eGullet. I've made this recipe a few times and I eventually bought a bundt pan to bake it in. Sometimes I use almond flour and sometimes I don't. I believe for the cake I was eating with my sorbet last night I used 60g almond flour and 100g King Arthur organic white flour. I'm pretty sure I once tried a bit of Fiori di Sicilia and orange flower water for citrus flavor.
I got the idea to serve the munavalgekook with my chocolate sorbet because it was in the freezer too.