Home Made Ice Cream (2013– )

[JoNorvelleWalker]

A harder experiment with the (lack of) equipment that I have! Should be doable though, once I get more milk.

However, although Migoya calls for a custard to be cooked at 185, McGee says 180, MC@H says 181, and Rose Levy Beranbaum says 170-180 ("Do not cook above 180").

[paulraphael]

My custards don't thicken until around 185, but I use about a third as many yolks as what most recipes call for. I've read (but haven't tested) that the lower the yolk concentration, the higher the thickening temperature.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Off topic:

For tonight's almond munavalgekook I folded the batter with my hands. Best it has turned out. I could not decide, so I served two desert courses: cake, then ice cream. It seemed wrong to present them together.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Thanks for posting, JoNorvelle.

The one remaining question I have is about time spent at temperature. Pasteurization works by heating milk for a specific amount of time, presumeably to minimize effects on flavor. For example, flash pasteurization heats milk very briefly to minimize flavor effects.

Standard pasteurization today heats milk to around 161°F for 15 seconds; UHT pasteurization to 275°F for one second.

I'd be curious to know if you pick up any cooked flavors by heating to 185 and holding for a minute (a slightly exaggerated mimicking of making custard with a low number of yolks). I might try this myself.

I did the experiment as best I could. The milk got up to 185.2, as when I lifted the pot off the stove at temperature, the burner cover stuck to the bottom of the pan! I was measuring seconds but I got a bit discombobulated. After a minute or so I cooled the pot in a water bath.

The milk tastes fine to me for drinking -- which is good because there is a lot of it. I will leave further milk experiments to people with better equipment, more agility, or at least more milk.

Maybe some whole egg in your custard would give more thickening at a lower temperature?

[JoNorvelleWalker]

I'm having some of my peanut butter gelato from MC@H. Wonderful stuff. All the texture and mouthfeel of ice cream but with no egg or dairy. Easy to make. Particularly good, I would think, for those who do not care for custard. After a few hours of hardening the gelato was perfect for scooping. After a few days in the freezer it gets quite hard indeed, but no icyness develops.

What I really would have liked to have made is MC@H pistachio gelato. Sadly I could find no pistachio butter or pistachio oil locally. Even more sad are the prices of the online sources.

Question for anyone who can answer: are pistachio butter and pistachio paste the same thing?

[gap]

In my experience, you really need to check the ingredient list to know for sure (that probably doesn't help you). In theory "pistachio paste" is "pure pistachio paste" made from only ground pistachios. If it doesn't have the word "pure" in front it may or may not include vegetable oil or, possibly, (bitter) almond extract or sugar - neither of which I've ever understood. Similarly, pistachio butter may include oil or salt or may be "pure pistachio paste" from only ground nuts - it just depends.

Edited February 24, 2013 by gap (log)

[Emily_R]

Jo -- For the PB&J gelato, did you grind your own peanut butter or did you use commercially prepared peanut butter? If the latter -- did you use a natural peanut butter or a commercial one like Jif?

Thanks!

[Ruben Porto]

Hi Jo,

whynut.co.uk does some good nut pastes here in the UK and sell 110g pots, which aren't too expensive. I don't know whether they ship to North America but you could send them an e-mail and ask.

Their pistachio paste is quite strong, with a slight bitter hint, but their hazelnut and almond pastes are good.

I thought I replied to your question about which thermometer I use but turns out I didn't so my bad. I must be losing my mind in my old age. I use the Gourmet Folding Probe Food Thermometer by ETI. I got it from amazon for about £19 and it is accurate to 0.5°C.

Regarding the taste of cooked milk issue, heating to 71.4°C does not result in a cooked milk flavour.

Hope that helps.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Jo -- For the PB&J gelato, did you grind your own peanut butter or did you use commercially prepared peanut butter? If the latter -- did you use a natural peanut butter or a commercial one like Jif?

Thanks!

Emily, for the peanut butter I used "Natural Jif" which is not exactly pure peanuts but I like the taste. I lack the technology to produce smooth nut butters beyond my trusty mortar. I would like to make the recipe again using a commercially ground product that was just peanuts with no added salt or sugar.

Note I made peanut butter gelato, not PB&J gelato. Here it is the season neither for strawberries nor for concord grapes. Though I do have an old unopened bottle of organic concord grape juice in the pantry that I may try. However I can't help but think the resulting color would be disgusting and I like the idea of plain peanut butter better.

To save anyone confusion, the MC gelato recipe and the MC@H gelato recipe are different. Both recipes are said to produce similar results.

Ruben, I had checked the pistachio sources from the blog post on your website. Callebaut is regionalized. If you select some countries you see pistachio paste as a product, but for the US they offer only hazelnut. I saw Whynut looked local but I did not ask if they exported. Because of the bioterrorism laws here, importing food or "food contact surfaces" (i.e. cookware) can be a nightmare.

There is a local candy company that must use pistachio paste. Perhaps I will ask if they will sell me some or at least tell me who their suppliers are.

By the way, can anyone tell me how the eG multiquote feature works?

[JoNorvelleWalker]

It seems I have been collecting peanut butters and peanut oils. Today I took a batch of Modernist peanut butter gelato to work for a party. It was very well received. I used Once Again brand of creamy peanut butter that is made from only one ingredient, organic peanuts. And which has a dire warning label: "CONTAINS PEANUTS". The peanut oil used was Loriva, which is a nice brown color.

To be picky, the Once Again creamy is not as smooth as Jif. "Creamy" I guess is relative. To my taste Jif Natural is pretty good stuff, and would work well for gelato once the added sugar and salt were properly accounted for. However no one complained about the slight texture of the gelato made with Once Again.

I urge anyone who has read thus far to try Modernist gelato. In addition to an ice cream maker it requires an immersion blender, but it is a very easy recipe with unbelievable results. Another nice feature, the gelato maintained a proper serving consistency for forty five minutes sitting out at room temperature, and probably would have much longer. The future may be plastics.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

As a change from modernist frozen dessert, most recently I have been reading Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream. All her recipes are Philadelphia ice cream with a base of cream, milk, sugar, salt, and flavoring. For French ice cream she refers the reader to David Lebovitz.

What makes Molly Moon's better than most recipes for Philadelphia ice cream is that she is not afraid of 26% butterfat (as I calculate it). And the results are not overly sweet. In the one batch I made the defect has been that the butterfat is slightly churned to butter. This may have been my fault as I decided to follow Cuisinart's directions to spin for forty minutes (Molly Moon says to "process according to manufacturer's instructions"), rather than fifteen minutes as I typically do for ice cream. I pulled the plug at thirty minutes. Even that was way too long. This is the only batch I have made in the ICE-100 where the butterfat was over churned.

To accompany the ice cream I took an idea from Ferran Adria and made an espuma of creme anglaise. I rather liked the espuma better than the ice cream.

[timpoblete]

I've tried 3 batches using Ruben's techniques (http://icecreamscience.com/) and fed it to my relatives, although I did cut the sugar down by 1/3 because I prefer my ice cream on the less sweet side:

1. Nutella (using Ruben's calculations and Clotilde's Nutella proportion). This came out a lot creamier than I would have liked, likely due to the high fat and solids content in the Nutella. It was very mousse-like. The proportions were basically 1/3 Nutella, 1/3 Cream, 1/3 Milk (whole). I will be remaking this with a lower fat content, probably cutting down on the cream. Nonetheless, none of this batch made it out of the family party alive.

2. Olive Oil (based on his 36% Milkfat Sweet Cream Recipe and David Lebovitz's Oilve Oil Ice Cream recipe). I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe it was approximately 15% olive oil by total volume. I bought a bottle from a local farmer at farmer's market. They use the young olives (still very green), so the flavor was very fruity. Several people had said that they couldn't taste the olive oil much, although I thought it was pretty strong. Be sure to add more salt than you think you'd need. The texture was also very soft, considering the oil helps against freezing.

3. Cookies and Cream (based on his Cream recipe and crumbling in Newman Organic Oreos). The Newman-O's were crunchy at first, but as the ice cream melted they got a little soggy. I likely crumbled the O's too small. Best to leave some larger chunks for crunch.

That being said, I wished I was able to get a little more overrun (air) into the batches just for ease of scooping without waiting. I was wondering if anyone here has had any luck with the KitechnAid ice cream maker attachment? Considering that there are several adjustable speeds on the mixer, I would assume it would be possible to get additional overrun?

[JoNorvelleWalker]

That being said, I wished I was able to get a little more overrun (air) into the batches just for ease of scooping without waiting. I was wondering if anyone here has had any luck with the KitechnAid ice cream maker attachment? Considering that there are several adjustable speeds on the mixer, I would assume it would be possible to get additional overrun?

I have a KitchenAid mixer, but I don't have the ice cream attachment for it. On the Cuisinart ICE-100 that I have, overrun is controlled by which of two dashers one uses.

Recently I fed a batch of vannila to my family made as close to Ruben's recipe as I could, though I did not weigh the liquid ingredients. The grandchildren professed it was the best ice cream they had had in their lives. I wished for higher butterfat, myself.

My current experiment was another batch of chocolate sorbet based on Giorgio Locatelli's chocolate mineral foam that I discussed in post #59. This time I left out the alcohol and the texture did not work at all. It seems the antifreeze is necessary. The result was hard chunks, with no overrun at all. The "sorbet" still tastes OK (it is Lindt and Gerolsteiner after all) but it is not a joy to eat.

[Ruben Porto]

Great to see you keeping the ice cream dream alive Joe! I've been meaning to update the vanilla recipe to cut out the skim milk powder. Give the recipe for vanilla ice cream without an ice cream maker a go, but ignore the stuff about not using an ice cream maker and use yours. The vanilla extract and the bean together work really really well. The butterfat content in the recipe for vanilla without an ice cream maker is also higher.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

The vanilla I mentioned that I made was actually from your sweet cream recipe to which I added some vanilla bean paste, not your vanilla recipe. Also, I just sort of noticed, the milk I use is whole milk, not semi skim.

[timpoblete]

^^^JoNorvelleWalker, I made the vanilla the same way, using the sweet cream recipe and adding 2 vanilla beans. I did not use any standard sugar though, in attempts to eliminate all the fructose from the recipe. Instead I had used light corn syrup. See the post below for details regarding fructose/glucose, which I in Ruben's blog, but thought it might be of some use to people here who may want to reduce their intake of fructose:

Recent studies have shown that Fructose is much more harmful to the body than Glucose and I would like to reduce the amount of Fructose in the mixture while maintaining the Glucose levels.

According to Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, she adds a bit of glucose (tapioca syrup or light corn syrup) to improve texture, but I believe she states somewhere in her book that the quantity of corn/tapioca syrup should be 2 tbsp at most. I’m not sure what the rational for that is and I was hoping you may know? NOTE: Light corn syrup is primary glucose without any fructose, while high fructose corn syrup is corn syrup that has had the glucose turned into fructose.

Table sugar is generally 50/50 fructose/glucose, fructose being the sweet component and glucose being a sugar molecule of some kind.

I’ve experimented with a 100% glucose vanilla ice cream, per your sweet cream recipe with the addition of 2 vanilla beans, and it lacked any flavor at all. The texture was smooth though, indicating that the glucose did it’s job. I’ll be using your recipes with the fructose reduced to 1/4th and maintaining same glucose levels.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Interesting topic. Here is a link to a paper on the use of dextrose (the predominant naturally occurring form of glucose) in ice cream manufacture:

http://www.archive.org/stream/dextroseincommer00corb/dextroseincommer00corb_djvu.txt

The text is rather long and I did not reread it tonight, however my remembrance is that for high butter fat ice cream tasting groups preferred a formula sweetened with a mix of dextrose and sucrose, and for lower butterfat ice cream tasters preferred all sucrose. However I am old and my memory may be shot from too much HFCS, so take this with a grain of salt.

Corn syrup or glucose syrup is not just glucose, it also has longer carbohydrate molecules. Dextrose will help lower the freezing point of ice cream better than sucrose, and since dextrose is less sweet than sucrose, the mix need not be overly sweet. Because of the larger molecules in corn syrup, it is not as effective in lowering freezing temperature as dextrose. However the larger molecules will help prevent iciness and thus hopefully improve ice cream texture. The downside is that corn syrup has a slightly funny taste. And corn syrup actually contains an ingredient that will increase ice crystal size in ice cream! That chemical is oxidane. (Otherwise known as water.)

From reading the Karo faq:

http://www.karosyrup.com/faq.html

"Corn syrup is a mildly sweet, concentrated solution of dextrose and other sugars derived from corn starch. It is naturally sweet. Corn syrup contains between 15% to 20% dextrose (glucose) and a mixture of other types of sugar."

One problem I have had with corn syrup, at least Karo, is that it contained high fructose corn syrup. The faq explains that starting in the 1970's HFCS was added to Karo, but now due to customer requests the HFCS has been removed. However with the bottle of Karo in my hand, HFCS is still the second ingredient listed.

Edited April 24, 2013 by JoNorvelleWalker (log)

[Bojana]

Question about safety: I want to prep the ice cream or sorbet base, cool and freeze directly without churning, then take out to fridge on the day before I want to eat the ice, let melt in the fridge, churn and freeze for few hours. Are there big issues with this plan? Would it help to shortly boil the melted base to kill the bacteria before cooling and churning? Could you in theory repeat this process of melting and churning few times if you cook the base each time?

[JoNorvelleWalker]

timpoblete -- as to your your question on increasing overrun, in post #18 jrshaul suggests using guar gum for increasing overrun.

Bojana -- I was hoping someone could answer better than I can, however from a health standpoint I would not hesitate to serve the melted and then spun product, as long as the mix was pasteurized to begin with. Note, I'm not giving advice that this is fully safe, I'm saying what I would do. Whether there is an effect on taste from still freezing the base, I am not sure. Frozen milk is pretty gross.

Also, if the base includes eggs or dairy I would never boil it! Modernist Cuisine volume 1 has very useful time and temperature information for pasteurizing ice cream base.

By the way, did you get your Musso fixed?

[Bojana]

Hi Jo,

I am making my ice cream according to Jenny's method, so no eggs but I am boiling my milk and cream base. I will make my ice this weekend and check the texture next week Thursday - if it is icy, i will respin. Big dinner party on Saturday so no time to do everything in one day. And no, my Musso is still not fixed. My father in law took it to repair it and not long after the poor man had a (mild) heart attack. He is well and recovering now but my Musso is not the top of priorities right now.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Very sorry for your father in law's health news. Let us know how the ice cream turns out.

[paulraphael]

Here's a rough guideline for sugars that I find works well.

I like the total sugars to be 14 to 15% of the recipe by weight.

The breakdown is roughly 65% sucrose, 25% dextrose (powdered glucose—not atomized glucose), and 10% trimoline (I make my own invert syrup ... it keeps a long time).

This formula gives a final ice cream that's a bit less sweet than store bought ice cream or most home recipes, but that has ample freezing point suppression. There's no need for adding alcohol to the mix, or for serving at overly warm temps. I formulate this for a drawing temperature of 23°F/ -5°C (this is the temperature at which you remove from the ice cream machine), and a serving temp of 6° to 10°F / -14° to -12°C.

It's also more resistant to iciness than a comparable recipe made with all sucrose.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

What does the invert sugar do for the recipe? I'd just as soon avoid extra fructose if I can. I once experimented adding Lyle's to my mix and was not thrilled with the results. I may yet try to get some dextrose mail order, as I cannot find it locally.

Meanwhile I have a new candidate for the best ice cream I have made: bay laurel, as inspired by Leslie in the bay laurel thread.

I used

800 ml heavy cream

250 ml whole milk

100 g sugar

6 large egg yolks

3 dried Turkish bay leaves

As usual I followed the icecreamscience method, however for the last two batches I have used a Windsor pan rather than a wide pot, which makes a whole lot less work for me. For one thing the thermistor probe stays in the mix much easier. I reduced the mixture at about 160 deg F for an hour and a half, giving the laurel a chance to infuse. The recipe made just the right amount of mix for my Cuisinart ICE-100.

There are no defects. Nothing that I would want to change. Perfectly smooth and just the right amount of sweetness and flavoring, which is rather subtile. The laurel imparts a lovely subtile color too! I don't think I need worry about iciness, as so far I've eaten a quarter of the batch in one sitting.

[Bojana]

Jo,

In short, you play with invert sugar and dextrose together to lower the freezing point while keeping same sweetness as sugar. Also prevents cristalisation and sandy texture. I am away for a couple of days, can share more once i am back home, from a great book that Darienne eas so kind to send

[timpoblete]

What does the invert sugar do for the recipe? I'd just as soon avoid extra fructose if I can. I once experimented adding Lyle's to my mix and was not thrilled with the results. I may yet try to get some dextrose mail order, as I cannot find it locally.

Meanwhile I have a new candidate for the best ice cream I have made: bay laurel, as inspired by Leslie in the bay laurel thread.

I used

800 ml heavy cream

250 ml whole milk

100 g sugar

6 large egg yolks

3 dried Turkish bay leaves

As usual I followed the icecreamscience method, however for the last two batches I have used a Windsor pan rather than a wide pot, which makes a whole lot less work for me. For one thing the thermistor probe stays in the mix much easier. I reduced the mixture at about 160 deg F for an hour and a half, giving the laurel a chance to infuse. The recipe made just the right amount of mix for my Cuisinart ICE-100.

There are no defects. Nothing that I would want to change. Perfectly smooth and just the right amount of sweetness and flavoring, which is rather subtile. The laurel imparts a lovely subtile color too! I don't think I need worry about iciness, as so far I've eaten a quarter of the batch in one sitting.

Bay Leaves in desserts is something I haven't seen much around, but seems to work really well. I did a couple of batches of bay leaf / chocolate ice cream (got the idea from a hot chocolate recipe book) a couple of years ago that I loved. I'll probably give this a try sans chocolate.

Jo, how do Turkish bay leaves differ from the more prevalent bay leaves in groceries?

Also, how does the Windsor pan make less work? Is there less stirring required? I've recently purchased a 30cm pan, which has 70% more surface area than the 23cm pan Ruben uses in his recipes. This cuts the evaporation time from 60 minutes down to 35 minutes.