cdh

Me too. This is a rerun of my rhubarb strawberry elderflower thing I did when the elderflowers were in bloom.

I just did some rhubarb today as well... cup of sugar, 1.25 lb of rhubarb water to cover, brought to the boil then cooled. Squeeze of lemon. Pinch of xanthan. Produced about 1.5 pints, so I topped up the second with frozen strawberries. Will post results tomorrow evening.

w/r/t the date on the salt- My bet is it is there to head off complaints when it cakes or melts back into a single huge lump of salt. I bet some lab exposed the cardboard tube the salt is sold in to "high average" household humidity conditions and came up with an amount of time that it would protect the salt inside from absorbing enough water to be a problem. Regarding expiry on other stuff, I've never paid attention to it. Milk especially... some milk last a week past date and is fine. Some milk goes funky 4 or 5 days before the date. Just have to be attentive to your dairy... Smell tests and coffee curdling test beat a date stamp any day.

Is your grapefruit/shiso going to be electric magenta? My shiso shrub stuff is a wild color straight out of the bottle. What are you using for the grapefruit base, hand processed fresh grapefruits, or canned stuff, or juice?

A very fine source of orange oil that lots of people have handy! I wonder how candied orange peel would work as a mix-in?

Try orange oil. Dissolve some in some vodka and add it by the drop. I've got a bunch of citrus oils about 1% oil in 99% everclear stored in atomizer bottles. A mist or two of that makes citrus flavor pop. Big fan of the bitter orange oil, and the blood orange oil. The tangerine I've tried has been a bit disappointing. Be careful about keeping the dilution to about 99:1... too concentrated it can become irritating.

I'm having great success with sorbets from frozen supermarket fruit. Put a quarter cup of sugar in the blender, add frozen mango chunks, squeeze a little lemon on top, a pinch of xanthan and enough water to make it go... once reduced to puree freeze in the creami pint.

Safety regs, lack of interchangeable parts and lack of sufficient power. To commandeer a hand blender into pacojet service you'd need a new snap on pacojet blade with no guard around it, which would be a liability nightmare so nobody would manufacture one. If you hack together a DIY pacoblade to snap on to your hand blender, the gearing in the pacojet would indicate it is putting out a lot more torque than a vanilla hand blender could muster, so it might not go anywhere even if you do muscle it straight downward into your brick of slippery frozen stuff.

Think about a clear epoxy coating like they use in the river tables... that stuff is near indestructible and can showcase the wood... I'd imagine the woodworker you're getting it from would be familiar with the idea and could show you how that looks and give you a tour of its properties... You probably don't want to leave the wood unfinished.

I've been using bottled kefir as the base for fruity treats, and augmenting it with lactose free half and half. My recipe goes like this- put 100g of sugar plus a random hunk off of the cream cheese brick plus about 25g of some booze or other into the creami pint, then nuke it for 15 seconds. Add kefir and any chopped up fruit up to about half way and blitz it with the hand blender until blended to your preferences... top up with half and half and stir a bit to combine everything. Freeze for 24 hours, spin. Works very nicely. I've been playing with adding a pinch of xanthan, though I don't know what it difference actually makes.

" A few weeks after publishing the report, the WHO issued a clarification insisting it was not telling consumers to stop eating processed meat." Hmmmm.... an order of both bacon both ways? You can't have it both ways.

The Gelato button is supposed to be the go-to for custard bases... Give that a shot and see if it helps.

Haven't tried the Tonnino... am remedying that now. A six-pack of their ventresca is on the way.

For a difference, perhaps butter your bread... Americans don't tend to do that, Brits do. Or if you're a Brit, try mayo instead of the butter. (But I don't think the two would play nicely together simultaneously.) Also think about adding alfalfa sprouts as your green addition. A curly tangle of them is much less likely to get wilty than a single leaf of lettuce. Tapenades, or olive slices are also nice. And think about cheeses that spread, not slice... A slathering of camembert on the bread would certainly liven up turkey breast.

I tried a rhubarb elderflower strawberry sorbet. It initially rang in at north of 30, and I watered it down to about 29. Perfect texture without any stabilizer additions. Going to be repeated. Perhaps with a squeeze of lemon juice next time. Hope my elderflower tree still has some flowers on it.

Have you taken a brix reading on the sorbet base? What is the target for a sorbet with a nice texture? North of 30?

Sounds like the Wired guy read what Ninja sent along as documentation. Since I got the refurb with no documentation, I can't confirm or deny that they tell you not to use normal ice cream recipes... but reading that review makes it sound like that is a thing said in the docs.

On the subject of making your own, I've been playing with my Creami a bit, and have made some good stuff. I've been very lazy base-wise, not getting around to cooking up anything custardy, and not feeling like consuming lots of heavy cream recently... so my base has been 50/50 by volume of almond milk and blueberry kefir. Just that, with a drizzle of blueberry syrup and a couple of tablespoons of sugar in made a nice batch when run on the Light Ice Cream setting, but the leftovers froze up like a rock and needed reprocessing the following evening. So I decided to try playing with stabilizers, and happened to have some xanthan handy, so the next batch was 50/50 with syrup, and sugar came out better, but still didn't keep a nice texture after a day in the fridge. So batch 3 was the same base, 1/4t of xanthan, but with 3 tablespoons of sugar, a squeeze of lemon juice and a tablespoon of gin added. Bingo! I think the extra sugar plus the alcohol is what makes it nice and scoopable out of the freezer the next day.

Just so you know, Amazon does have procedures in place for when their deliveries do damage... I just wanted to vent that a driver spun his truck tires in my stone driveway and dug some holes as he raced to get out of here, and Amazon transferred me to a property damage insurance carrier. Complain in the right way and you could get your door repainted.

If you really want to do the Japanese thing correctly, the stuff you're looking for is called "bincho tan". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binchōtan It is beautiful to look at, burns hotter than normal charcoal, and is extremely difficult to find outside of Japan. I gather that there are some hexagonal sticks of charcoal that try to mimic bincho tan. If that is impossible or out of budget, big solid lump charcoal is the thing...

Some reading for you: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/threads/bakers-yeast-for-a-sahti.256887/

As I recall, some of the US interpretations of the scandinavian Gotlandsdricke were brewed with bread yeast... you might look for recipes for that and work on variations. You're not going to get a juicy hazy NEIPA or a clean and clear lager out of one... but you'll probably find something that it really works for. I'd lean towards wheat/barley grain bill, and don't go nuts with the hops until you get a sense of what the yeast flavor underlying it is going to be.

Amazon has OXO cooling racks on sale for $8. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076JN4B2J/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1

Unwrapped and broke in my Creami finally. Freezer cycling between 0F and -10F. Can of pineapple chunks poured straight into the pint and a spoonful scooped off and eaten to get the level down to the line. Stellar results. Very very nice! Do they always produce hot electric motor aromas while working?

He's not wrong that its the R&D that you're paying for... Traditional alcohol-based spirits have about 1000 years of prior art to draw on and use to optimize processes and predict what you're going to get. If n/a spirits have a thousand year run, they'll naturally come down in price as the body of usable knowledge fills in.