sverreef

They are my favorite produce/wild harvest, but unfortunately, I don't know how to describe the flavour. There are a few posts about them in the foraging thread though: https://forums.egullet.org/topic/38682-foraging-for-favorites/?do=findComment&comment=2358087 They are an acquired taste which is known to divide families, including my own, but since thyme ice cream is one of your favorite ice cream flavors, you're probably less likely to hate them than the vast majority of people... 😅

Made a new thyme infused batch for Mother's Day, which was celebrated today here in Norway. This time, I tried to infused 5.7 grams of thyme (1% of total weight) for 15 minutes. Flavour was good, but not as bright, vibrant and distinct as the previous batch of 8 grams for 10 minutes. Next time I'll try sous vide vacuum infusion. We had a horrible strawberry harvest last year, so this small package of green/blushing berries picked in September/October was the only strawberries I had left in the freezer: In hindsight, I should probably have just sliced them and used them as a garnish, but I decided to make a fluid gel similar to the cloudberry fluid gel I made last week. Flavour wasn't bad, but the colour could definitely have been more appealing... 😋 Flavour pairing was OK, but nothing like the magic which happened between thyme and cloudberries. Ripe berries would probably be an improvement in that regard. Also on the plate, under the white chocolate, is a roasted pumpkin seed paste/praline. Originally intended to compliment the strawberries, but at least in my opinion, it worked quite well with the thyme ice cream too.

Last time I used eGullet to rationalize a kitchen tool buying decision, I ended up with a Henkelman chamber vacuum sealer more than 3 times my original budget. A $20,000 homogenizer will most definitely not happen though... 😬

Does the BioSpec sound like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf-0JBx_uoY The main appeal of the Dynamic MiniPro for me, besides the price, is that it can perform other tasks than just homogenizing, but the motor sound in the above video makes me quite concerned about the build quality. Or maybe this is perfectly normal for rotor-stators at low rpm? There are a few concerning reviews on Amazon citing problems related to lack of power and overheating as well though, and I haven't found a definitive answer to the maximum continous runtime the motor can handle.

I've been looking at the DMX 160 lately, but I haven't found a Norwegian source for the homogenizer attachment yet. I'd also like to see some user reviews, because there's not a lot of info to be found, and with a couple of extra accessories, it's not exactly cheap either.

I've eaten a bit too much ice cream lately, but I'll make a few extra thyme batches so I can compare the effect of different amounts of thyme and infusion times. I used 8 grams for 10 minutes in a 565.5 gram recipe by the way. Your infusion recipe scales to 2.83 grams of thyme with the Chefsteps recipe I've been using, so that should establish a useful baseline for dialing in the thyme flavour. Do you have any recommendations regarding other good flavour pairings with thyme ice cream by the way? My stock of frozen cloudberries is too precious to use for this type of trial and error 😋

The thyme ice cream surpassed my wildest expectations. Great on its own, but paired with the cloudberry/rieslaner fluid gel I made, it was absolutely sublime! The alternative LBG hydration method fixed the texture issue of my last batch as well. Now I need to find a way to consistently replicate the thyme flavour. Maybe the Isi gourmet whip can be used to make a thyme syrup with more consistent and controllable infusion parameters? I think I have an unused rapid infusion set in a storage box somewhere in the basement... With a few tweaks (incorporating a Panna Cotta element), I think this is probably our new Christmas Eve dessert 😃

LBG is a new ingredient in my repertoire, so I can't say for sure what happened. It's most likely a result of insufficient temperature for hydration though. I was uncertain about adding LBG and the other dry ingredients during the blending stage the first time I used the CS creme fraiche recipe, especially since I have opted not to boil the elderflower infusion together with the whole milk. Therefore, I added the dry ingredients to the milk to make sure the LBG was hydrated >90 degrees Celsius in my second batch (spruce tips flavour) as a comparison test. With little or no noticable difference, I went back to the more convenient way of adding the dry ingredients during blending. Now, I have a new batch in the freezer, testing the alternative method of hydrating the LBG. This time it's flavoured with thyme. Milk, water and glucose infused by 8 grams of thyme for 10 minutes at 85-75 Celsius. After straining out the thyme, sugar, salt and LBG was added before bringing the mixture to 92 degrees Celsius. It tasted very promising before freezing, so I can hardly wait to test it together with a cloudberry coulis/sauce tomorrow

Last week's batch of elderflower ice cream. Flavour was fantastic once again, but texture was slightly icy even after two spins in the Creami. I think I might have fucked up the locust bean gum hydration in this batch, because the milk/creme fraiche fat separated in the Creami beaker. Or maybe that was a result of the warm milk curdling when I added the elderflower infusion (I picked one with added lemon from the freezer by mistake). The mix was perfectly smooth after the blending step however...

Leftovers from last week's 60 hours, 60 degrees Celsius pork belly. Reheated 1.5 hours at 60 C and finished in the oven at 230 C for 15 minutes.

https://forums.egullet.org/topic/163060-pacojet-competitor-the-ninja-creami/?do=findComment&comment=2373949 I have no idea, sice Ninja doesn't seem to have published specs on the Creami's rpms. Judging by visual comparisons I've seen, the Creami is probably slower though, but in most cases, that can be fixed by a respin or two.

Thanks for sharing your insight, @paulraphael. Sorrel has always been a favourite of mine, but I've never actually tasted it as a prepared element in a dish, just as a snack in the wild, as a garnish or as an element in a salad, so I'm really excited to try it in an ice cream this spring. Hopefully, the creami is powerful enough to make a smooth texture using the Eldridge method. If not, could melting, straining and refreezing after the initial frozen processing be a viable option? Thyme will be my next project, and your guidelines will be of great help. Do you recommend using sous vide to keep the temperature constant during infusion? But first I have to make a double batch of the Creme Fraiche and elderflower ice cream I've been raving about in the Ninja Creami topic for a family dinner on Saturday. Reading this topic, I realize that I've used the wrong terminology though. The flavouring agent I have used is definitely an elderflower/water infusion, not an elderflower extract...

Is this still your preferred amounts of herbs and infusion times? I'm specifically looking to try thyme and basil with the ChefSteps Creme Fraiche recipe, since thyme and basil is supposed to work well with cloudberries. I'm a bit surprised that you recommend infusion for sorrel though. I thought juicing or something like this was the only way to capture the bright and vibrant flavours of fresh sorrel leaves: Or is it a different sorrel?

Congratulations on the new machine I'm happy with the Creami so far, but I wouldn't rule out a possible upgrade in the future, so I'm looking forward to read more about your experience with the Frix Air. Does the small beaker size affect the ability to make quenelles/rochers? Also, does it leave unprocessed ice crystals along the side and bottom of the beaker? That's my main complaint regarding the Ninja Creami... Is the overpressure feature adjustable, so you can turn it down or up if you want a denser or lighter texture? Some sites claim 0.5 bar overpressure, while others claim 2 bars by the way. Can you elaborate on this?

Spun an extra virgin olive oil version today. In order to keep the total fat percentage close to the original base recipe (using commercially available creme fraiche 35% and whole milk 3.5% here in Norway), I opted for a low fat creme fraiche (10% fat), and replaced only 45 grams of the water with evoo. This was another resounding success for the CS recipe, which worked great as a vehicle for the fruity arbequina evoo I used, with just a small hint of pepper in the aftertaste. It was a mistake to pair it with caramelized white chocolate however. I went with the white chocolate because I was afraid that dark chocolate would overpowered the subtle and delicate flavours of the evoo, but I couldn't be more wrong. The bitterness from the dark chocolate on my second portion complimented and highlighted the best parts of the olive oil perfectly.

New version of the CS Creme Fraiche ice cream, this one flavoured with spruce tips: Not quite as good as the one I made last week with elderflower extract, but still very, very good. I'l definitely pick more spruce tips this year. Flavour pairing with raspberries and dark chocolate (55%) soil was also great, but my second serving with caramelized white chocolate instead of dark chocolate, worked even better. Scooping and plating was a bit rushed, since I'm not used to serve ice cream as a desert, but it's fun to try something new. The creami and this base recipe is already proving to be a game changer for me Spruce tip juice was made by blending 150 grams of frozen spruce tips with 150 grams of water and passing the resulting puree though a fine mesh sieve. Next time I'll try to juice the spruce tips in my slow juicer instead. 2 grams of citric acid was also added to the base recipe to adjust the flavour. Both the raspberries and the spruce tips were picked less than 20 meters from my parents' porch by the way

Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to experiment much with the Creami this fall/winter, but besides a few more batches of the Modernist Cuisine sour rhubarb sorbet, I made a cloudberry sorbet for Christmas Eve, which turned out great. Recipe is a mix between the MC sour rhubarb sorbet and a cloudberry sauce/coulis I've made for years: 350g deseeded cloudberries (sous vide pasteurized @ 57 degrees C) 46,1g glucose powder DE42 11,6g sugar 115g Müller-Catoir Herzog Rieslaner Auslese (reduced from 230g) Salt 1,5g Citric acid 1,93g Apple cider vinegar 3,5g The complex flavour notes of fresh/raw cloudberries came out wonderfully. Even my sister liked it a lot, and she's not a big fan of cloudberries. Texture was good too, but I'll try to add a gram or two of locust bean gum next time I make it. Due to availability, I'll also try to switch glucose powder for liquid glucuse, and I can probably reduce the amount of the somewhat expensive dessert wine without affecting the flavour profile too much. This week, I tried the Creme Fraiche ice cream (sherbet?) recipe Chefsteps released a few weeks ago: https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/creme-fraiche-ice-cream I replaced water in the recipe with elderflower extract though, to make a play on a blue cheese, pickled elderflower, cream and honey dessert I got at restaurant Kontrast in Oslo back in 2019: Should have added more pickled elderflowers as garnish and grated a bit more frozen blue cheese on top of the caramelized white chocolate, but this was absolutely amazing. The recipe was also quick and easy to follow, so I think I've found the base recipe I'll use for a lot of my future Ninja Creami experiments I put a little bit of the mixture in a separate beaker to test spin the recipe, so I can't say for sure, but if you use 150 grams of creme fraiche to adjust the recipe on CS, you should come pretty close to the max fill line in one creami beaker. I used the sorbet setting with one respin by the way.

That one looked absolutely flawless! I definitely need to make a last ditch effort to find some Boletes next weekend. For the past couple of weeks I've been focusing on Craterellus tubaeformis. Sunday's trip resulted in 1,4 kg cleaned mushrooms, including a few Craterellus lutescens, but I could easily have picked twice or three times that amount. I also picked a few Hydnum repandum a copule of weeks ago:

Somewhere along the Norwegian coastline 😉

I would never have made a comparison of cloudberries and honey. They both have floral and bitter flavour notes, so once you cook the cloudberries, the similarities may become more pronounced. I can't remember the last time I had cooked cloudberries (jams/compotes) though. Not that I don't like it. Fresh or uncooked berries are just in a different league. Cloudberries have a very characteristic flavour, which people seem to either love or hate, but l really don't know how to explain the flavor to someone who's unfamiliar with it. The thing I love about them is the balance between sweetness, sourness and bitterness. Cooking them, or adding too much sugar, alter this fragile balance. In other foraging news, chanterelle season has been amazing so far in my area: I've probably picked about 10kg of cleaned chanterelles so far, so now I'm stocked up on dried, cooked and (my take on) creamed chanterelles. No luck finding any Boletus edulis yet though...

The flavour is pretty much spot on to my taste. On its own, the sourness is nearly too much, but I found that caramelized white chocolate balanced it nicely. I used citric acid instead of malic acid though, and also added 2,4 grams of salt in a recipe scaled to 56% of the original MC recipe, which almost reached the maximum fill line in the Creami pints.

My favorite wild harvest: Cloudberries Low temp sous vide pasteurization before freezing: Normally, I use them in a sauce or coulis I serve together with panna cotta. Now that I have an ice cream machine/Ninja Creami, I'll also try to replicate the flavour of the sauce in a sorbet.

I haven't had much time to experiment with the Creami yet, but I've made a few versions of the sour rhubarb sorbet since I got the machine. I really need to work on my scooping technique, but both flavour and texture have been great I may have deviated from the original recipe by straining the mixture after the blending step instead of before, which frankly sounded weird to me, so I'm not 100% sure it's meant to be so creamy. I guess I'll have to do a comparison once the rhubarb is back in season next year...

I think I'll end up buying an extra Boss to go tumbler first: https://www.breville.com/us/en/parts-accessories/parts/sp0008983.html And cut off the top (or bottom depending on how you look at it) to see if that can work as a cheap fix for blending small batches in the Super Q.

I've generally been happy with my Sage/Breville Super Q. It works great for soups, big batches of vegetable/fruit purées and jobs like that, but I really miss a small jar like the Twister to process smaller batches of herb oils, nut butters/pastes, etc. Unless Sage/Breville comes out with something like this soon, I guess my sister and brother in law will get another used kitchen appliance as a Christmas gift 😋