adrianvm

When I ordered from L'Epicerie I got a bunch of pistachio and hazelnut pastes, so my shipping wasn't so bad for the total order. But the truth is I still haven't found a source of hazelnut butter or 100% hazelnut paste that I like, or that tastes like what I get if I make it myself from lightly roasted hazelnuts. I think if you use the PB&J recipe and simply reverse the substitutions they made---so use water instead of juice, and use pistachio paste instead of peanut butter---then you'll get the recipe you want. I can double check tonight in the book. Do you have a scale that can weigh 0.3g of xanthan gum? If you don't I can try to weigh some xanthan gum and give you a volume measure for it.

I recommend that you not get too hung up on terminology. Italian "gelato" is generally said to be lower in fat (around 12%) and served at a warmer temperature. (And it's made without eggs.) So basically it's just a lower fat style of ice cream. There's nothing special that differentiates it from ice cream. The Modernist Cuisine "gelato" is made from pistachio paste and pistachio oil. They are probably calling it "gelato" simply because there's no dairy in it and they didn't want to use the word "cream". The original version calls for a bunch of stabilizers, but they later published a "simplified" version in their "At Home" book without most of those ingredients---that's the version I made. The fat content of the mix appears to be around 20%. That recipe is excellent. My advice is don't waste your time, or pistachios, on anything else. I don't think you'll miss the dairy. We didn't. Is the product you ordered from nuts.com the Love'n'Bake Pistachio Paste? I don't see anything else there, and like I said, that product didn't taste like pistachios to me, so I didn't bother trying to make the gelato with it. I think it's about 37% sugar. I think I made almond macaroons with it. When I read reviews on this product, many other customers complained about the almond flavor, so it wasn't just me. I'm skeptical that you could get a smooth texture by putting your ice cream mix in the blender. I think if it started grainy it would stay grainy. But I have to admit that I never tried that. You might possibly be able to get a smooth texture by putting pistachios in the food processor (or maybe a blender) with some of the pistachio oil and running it for 15-20 minutes, but I'd use just enough oil to keep it moving. I have produced very smooth nut butters by running nuts through a stone-grinding type grain mill equipped with stainless steel stones, but it clogs a lot and it's very slow. The fiddymentfarms stuff, as well as the other Italian 100% pistachio pastes I bought from L'epicerie were extremely smooth.

By sugar free I mean no sugars. No glucose. No sucrose. No fructose. (Agave is 90% fructose.) There is no difference between sugars that are refined and ones that are not. It's all sugar. I find it best for me to avoid sugar.

I've been making sugar free ice creams, and while most of them come out OK from the machine, once they have rested in the freezer they freeze solid. Even if I'm willing to go to the trouble of warming them up, it often seems to be a difficult task---the outside melts completely but the inside is still too hard to eat. (I suppose slow warming for perhaps an hour or two in the fridge might work, but I've never been that patient.) So I'm wondering about possible approaches to make things better. I understand that sugar plays a key role in controlling ice cream texture, so this could be a pretty difficult thing to do, especially if I try to avoid sugar-like replacement substances. I'd love to have an approach that was completely flexible and didn't rely on using erythritol or other sugar-like sweeteners, for example. McGee explains the role of sugar in a sorbet in a very simple fashion: ice crystals form and what's left behind is a highly concentrated sugar solution that can't freeze, hence the produce remains scoopable (if there is enough sugar). But the role of fats and other solids in ice cream is a mystery to me. I've been using erythritol and sometimes erythritol and polydextrose and still getting rock hard results. For example, I took a recipe that works with sugar: 2 cups heavy cream 1 cup milk 2/3 cup sugar 6 egg yolks and I replaced the sugar with 1/3 cup polydextrose and 1/3 cup erythritol and the result froze hard. I have to imagine that if I added enough polydextrose and/or erythritol I'd succeed eventually. But is there any other path to success here? The one recipe I ran across that really worked did so through the curious process of whipping cream and egg whites and then chilling the pre-aerated mix in the ice cream maker. In other words, it made use of a huge overrun. This ice cream was oddly airy and fluffy straight out of the machine. So I'm curious about other possibilities. What about using stabilizers? Do stabilizers just suppress ice crystals, or can they improve scoopability? (Somebody who sells Cremodan 30 is telling me it can improve scoopability in a sugar free ice cream---the cost to try it out (~$40) is kind of high, though.) Another thing I've seen but haven't tried is isomalto oligosacharides (e.g. Vitafiber). Anybody know the likely effect of these molecules? Similar to polydextrose?

I tried a bunch of pistachio pastes in preparation for making the Modernist Cuisine gelato. I haven't been so impressed by the very expensive imported products from Italy. Another complication is that they contain (a lot of) sugar, so it complicates scaling your recipe. So for example the Stramondo "Ritrovo" branded Pistachio Cream, costs something like $45/lb and is 43% sugar (so that's $79/lb for the nuts). I found it too sweet to eat directly, and when I made it into gelato it wasn't fantastic. The best product, by far, was the fiddymentfarms pistachio paste. It is very smooth and roasted enough to bring out the flavor but not too much. At $40/lb it's still darn expensive, but not as bad as the Italian stuff. The fiddyment "butter", which is half the price, is coarser and also has a different flavor that isn't as good, but I still thought it was OK. I guess you pay through the nose for the smooth texture. I also got some 100% pistachio pastes that were imported from Italy and I felt like they were all over-roasted. It seems to be a favored practice in Italy. I had the same problem with the hazelnut pastes. These pastes just taste like roast flavor to me instead of tasting like pistachio. Texture was good, though. As an aside, I read that almost no commercial pistachio gelato uses real pistachio paste, even in Italy, because it's too expensive. Instead they use pastes made from pistachios, almonds and green color. The "Pistachio Nut Paste" made by American Almond (in a can), which nuts.com sells is no good. It just tastes like almonds. They seem to put a bunch of almond extract in the product. Not sure what is going on there. I thought the Modernist Cuisine recipe was excellent.

Well, I was inspired to use sous vide because Modernist Cuisine posted that they got a reliably smooth texture that way, and texture has been a problem when I fry them. I asked Modernist Cuisine directly for advice and they suggest soaking the livers in salted milk over night to remove residual bile and blood before cooking at 60 C. They thought that sous vide cooking does make the off flavors worse.

Actually now that you mention it, I have actually done that. I had one package of livers that was fairly large, so I used one portion for my customary fried preparation, and it came out as usual with no astringent flavor. I used the other portion for the experimental sous vide liver mouse where I combined the raw liver with eggs and butter in the blender and then cooked it sous vide. And it developed the astrigent taste.

cdh, I think the livers were properly cleaned. I get my livers from the same place and didn't do anything different than when I cook them normally, and normal cooking does not produce the astringent taste. I observed the astrigent taste every time I cooked liver sous vide, which is 4 times, I think. Is it possible that the bile is destroyed by high heat cooking but not by lower heat? CatPoet, it sounds like you're saying you blanch the livers before cooking them. I have heard of this practice, though it's not clear what blanching is supposed to accomplish. The best explanation I've seen is that it makes it easier to remove membranes, perhaps more of an issue with veal liver than chicken? I have never done this and have always gotten good results (other than possibly issues with overcooking) by simply salting and pan frying livers.

I've been making chicken liver mousse by frying some chicken livers. I cook some shallots, deglaze the pan with port, reduce it, and then combine all of the above with butter in the food processor and strain it. It seems like the results are kind of variable. I believe this has to do with the step of cooking the livers. Sometimes I get them more cooked, sometimes less. The product often has a kind of gritty texture that some of my family don't like. In the recent posts on modernistcuisine they mentioned making chicken liver mouse by cooking the livers sous vide. In fact, the chef who did this specifically noted the problem of improper cooking of the livers. However, no information was given as to the temperature he used. So I cooked the livers at 131 F for 2 hours and then followed the procedure above. The resulting product was extremely smooth. But it had an astringent aftertaste that ruined the mousse. In fact, I ended up throwing it away. This brought to mind a different chicken liver preparation I had tried in the past where raw chicken livers were pureed with eggs and butter and the mixture was cooked sous vide. That product also had an astrigent taste. So I'm wondering where this astringent taste is coming from and what is necessary to eliminate it. If I sous vide cook the livers at some higher temperature will I be able to get a result which is smooth, and has a flavor similar to the flavor I got when I pan fried the livers?