Home Made Ice Cream (2015– )

[weinoo]

Well, the whole experiment ended up as a bit of a shitshow, but not for normal shitshow reasons.

 

First - the ice cream.  We really liked the flavor of the ice creams (at least the coffee one we got to really taste - more later). But texturally, I just don't know.  Sure - it has more of that commercial ice cream shop feel - chewier, not as quick to melt, or other issues that I'm unable to describe. Paul will be happy to know it really wasn't too sweet, though I could even dial back the sweeteners by a tablespoon or two w/o much problem, I think.  There's so little cream cheese in the overall mixture as well - but it needed straining anyway - maybe I didn't whisk it enough. The coffee flavor came through nicely - I used an espresso roast, coarsely ground, and steeped it in the cream/milk/sugar/corn syrup mixture for 5 minutes before straining that. Vanilla was, well, vanilla-y.

 

I wonder why she brings the mixture to another boil after adding the cornstarch slurry; cornstarch begins its thickening at lower than boiling point, and then can even start to thin out if stirred too much or overheated.

 

I would be tempted to try again, with some slight mods to the recipe. But would they suck then - like if I only heated the milk to, say, 180 for a minute or so?

 

Now - what happened that really was the shitshow part? I had the first batch (the vanilla) sitting pretty in its container in the freezer. When I opened the freezer to get the 2nd container out so I could transfer the ice cream from the Lello to the freezer, the container with the vanilla came sliding out of the freezer, smashed onto the wooden floor, and broke into like 50 pieces. Here was my just made vanilla ice cream, melting in a pool of broken glass, on my nice wooden floor. Who uses glass in a freezer?

[ccp900]

21 hours ago, weinoo said:

Made two bases this morning, to spin later this afternoon.

 

Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream's Black Coffee and Ugandan vanilla. 

 

Followed the recipes EXACTLY (though i don't have Ugandan vanilla beans). Okay, maybe NOT exactly - I did 1/2 recipe of each instead of a quart of each; this way, if they suck, I can just start over and not feel so bad about the waste.

 

Quite interested to see how my first attempt at using both light corn syrup and cornstarch turns out.

 

She boils the milk, cream, sugar, and corn syrup for 4 minutes before doing the cornstarch thing. Any idea why?

I think in an interview she said the boiling approximates the nano filtration that they do. Which increases the solids content. So you can boil but also just add skim milk powder which is easier

[Yiannos]

14 hours ago, paulraphael said:

 

My guess is it's a home-friendly vague approximation of what she does in her commercial ice cream. She pasteurizes at a moderate temperature (I think she said 75°C) for close to an hour. At least this was when she was making the base in-house. The cooking is about denaturing the milk proteins to the right degree so they'll take the place of eggs as an emulsifier. She generally doesn't like eggs in her ice cream. Maybe she found that a 4-minute boil gets the job done reasonably well? 

 

I believe I read somewhere that this is exactly why she uses this step. I have made many of the ice creams in her book and have always been very happy with the custardy texture sans eggs, though I have nothing against eggs at all. Her lemon recipe is fantastic and I find I like it better than those recipes I have made with a traditional custard base.

[Yiannos]

5 hours ago, weinoo said:

maybe I didn't whisk it enough

 

I did this the first few times I made these recipes. Now I add just a little bit of the hot milk at first and whisk thoroughly to get any lumps out, adding the rest slowly after it has smoothed out.

 

5 hours ago, weinoo said:

When I opened the freezer to get the 2nd container out so I could transfer the ice cream from the Lello to the freezer, the container with the vanilla came sliding out of the freezer, smashed onto the wooden floor, and broke into like 50 pieces.

 

This makes me sad.

[weinoo]

5 hours ago, weinoo said:

When I opened the freezer to get the 2nd container out so I could transfer the ice cream from the Lello to the freezer, the container with the vanilla came sliding out of the freezer, smashed onto the wooden floor, and broke into like 50 pieces.

 

6 minutes ago, Yiannos said:

This makes me sad.

 

For any number of reasons!

 

1. I was using one of those recently purchased OXO glass storage things. So that's wasted.

2. I gouged a nice hole in the wooden floor

3. I WASTED THE ICE CREAM! (though the amount I licked off the dasher and out of the Lello container led me to conclude it was tasty).

 

 

[JoNorvelleWalker]

1 hour ago, ccp900 said:

I think in an interview she said the boiling approximates the nano filtration that they do. Which increases the solids content. So you can boil but also just add skim milk powder which is easier

 

Nanofiltered milk is available in the local store.  @Ruben Porto's method calls for reducing the mix to concentrate the solids, but heating at 77C, not boiling.

 

[JoNorvelleWalker]

3 minutes ago, weinoo said:

 

 

For any number of reasons!

 

1. I was using one of those recently purchased OXO glass storage things. So that's wasted.

2. I gouged a nice hole in the wooden floor

3. I WASTED THE ICE CREAM! (though the amount I licked off the dasher and out of the Lello container led me to conclude it was tasty).

 

 

 

Might have been worse.  You could have cut your tongue.

 

[weinoo]

True, @JoNorvelleWalker - that would not be pleasant!

 

I want to give a shout out to @paulraphael and his most excellent (albeit geeky) ice cream blog stuff. The book reviews pointed me to Dana Cree's Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream, a fine work for even a beginning student like me.  I immediately borrowed it (via Libby) from my library, and it has been ordered for my bookshelf.

 

Here's a gratuitous picture of the coffee ice cream (via Jeni) - the survivor of my ice cream mishap of a few days ago. Quite good.

 

[kayb]

Thanks I am sure to this topic, I dreamed about making ice cream last night. Peach, specifically.

 

[paulraphael]

22 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

Nanofiltered milk is available in the local store.  @Ruben Porto's method calls for reducing the mix to concentrate the solids, but heating at 77C, not boiling.

 

 

Yeah, and she held at 77 for about 45 minutes. She started with raw milk, and centrifuged it to separate it into high-fat cream and low-fat milk. 

 

What she's calling nanofiltering is just reverse-osmosis. It's a heat-free way to remove water and condense the milk, to up the solids content. This was separate from the pasteurization step (which was done without evaporation), which she tailored for getting the milk proteins the way she liked (which was about texture, and also for flavor, according to her—although in my own blind tests no one could find any flavor difference between ice creams cooked at different times/temperatures within the ranges we tested). 

 

She hinted that her current methods (carried out by a dairy to her specs) are a bit different—maybe a somewhat shorter, hotter pasteurization.

 

In her homemade recipes, she adds stabilization and milk solids through cream cheese (a pretty funny hack). So I don't know how much she relies on  evaporation.

 

I personally don't like using evaporation to concentrate milk solids. It's tedious, inconsistent, and offers no advantages over adding low-temperature spray-dried skim milk. 

[JoNorvelleWalker]

1 hour ago, paulraphael said:

I personally don't like using evaporation to concentrate milk solids. It's tedious, inconsistent, and offers no advantages over adding low-temperature spray-dried skim milk. 

 

I doubt Ruben is reading our topic anymore, however he says he modified some of his recipes to use dried milk not because it gave better results than holding the mix at 77C for an hour, but because dried milk was more practical for the home cook.

 

On the subject of dried milk:  would it help @ElsieD and her less than 40% cream to replace dried skim milk in the recipes with dried whole milk?  I stocked up on dried whole milk at the start of the pandemic and I may give it a try myself.

 

[paulraphael]

4 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

I doubt Ruben is reading our topic anymore, however he says he modified some of his recipes to use dried milk not because it gave better results than holding the mix at 77C for an hour, but because dried milk was more practical for the home cook.

 

On the subject of dried milk:  would it help @ElsieD and her less than 40% cream to replace dried skim milk in the recipes with dried whole milk?  I stocked up on dried whole milk at the start of the pandemic and I may give it a try myself.

 

 

Ruben's ice creams are all so high-fat and high-solids, I'm skeptical that of any of these protein cooking techniques make a real difference. If he's not comparing results with triangle tests, I'm not giving much weight to these opinions. Anything you do with a recipe that has those numbers is going to be rich and dense and smooth. And none of the technique stuff is going to have a meaningful effect on flavor.

[ccp900]

11 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

I doubt Ruben is reading our topic anymore, however he says he modified some of his recipes to use dried milk not because it gave better results than holding the mix at 77C for an hour, but because dried milk was more practical for the home cook.

 

On the subject of dried milk:  would it help @ElsieD and her less than 40% cream to replace dried skim milk in the recipes with dried whole milk?  I stocked up on dried whole milk at the start of the pandemic and I may give it a try myself.

 

I have used dried whole milk before when I couldn’t find dried skim milk and it worked ok. I just had to make sure I accounted for the fat in the recipe. No real issues.

[paulraphael]

Just remember that dried whole milk much more perishable than dried skim. I even treat dried skim milk as if it's quite perishable (it isn't really, but it can take on stale flavors easily ... not sure if it actually gets stale of if it absorbs odors). I like to double bag milk powder and keep in the freezer. I'd definitely do this with whole milk powder.

[paulraphael]

On 8/10/2020 at 9:28 AM, weinoo said:

I want to give a shout out to @paulraphael and his most excellent (albeit geeky) ice cream blog stuff. The book reviews pointed me to Dana Cree's Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream, a fine work for even a beginning student like me.  I immediately borrowed it (via Libby) from my library, and it has been ordered for my bookshelf.

 

Than you, Mitch!

 

By geeky you mean sexy? Silly autocorrect.

[Margaret Pilgrim]

There has been a somewhat push-me-pull-me conversation here regarding desirable textures and how to attain them.    Dorie Greenspan describers the pleasures of simple homemade ice cream.

[ccp900]

1 hour ago, Margaret Pilgrim said:

There has been a somewhat push-me-pull-me conversation here regarding desirable textures and how to attain them.    Dorie Greenspan describers the pleasures of simple homemade ice cream.

Thanks for sharing

[paulraphael]

3 hours ago, Margaret Pilgrim said:

There has been a somewhat push-me-pull-me conversation here regarding desirable textures and how to attain them.    Dorie Greenspan describers the pleasures of simple homemade ice cream.

 

You could also say she's discovering the pleasures of going beyond simple ice cream. She's describing doing quite a bit of the chemistry that pastry chefs do when striving for better textures. She wanted to get rid of eggs, and found a way to avoid thin and icy textures by adding milk solids (skim milk powder) alternative sugars (honey—which is mostly invert syrup, which has more freezing point depression and better water control than sucrose) and another freezing point depressant (alcohol, which isn't a great ingredient, but can work). 

[heidih]

How do you you think the Persian "ice cream" bastani fits in the mix. I live in an area with a large  Persian population. and though not a sweets person I find it interesting in small amounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastani_sonnati  https://www.food.com/recipe/bastani-persian-rose-water-saffron-and-pistachio-ice-cream-318129

Edited August 13, 2020 by heidih (log)

[JoNorvelleWalker]

1 hour ago, heidih said:

How do you you think the Persian "ice cream" bastani fits in the mix. I live in an area with a large  Persian population. and though not a sweets person I find it interesting in small amounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastani_sonnati  https://www.food.com/recipe/bastani-persian-rose-water-saffron-and-pistachio-ice-cream-318129

 

 

Sounds good to me, except possibly for the amount of sugar.

 

[weinoo]

6 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

Sounds good to me, except possibly for the amount of sugar.

 

Yeah, no kidding!

[Margaret Pilgrim]

10 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

Sounds good to me, except possibly for the amount of sugar.

 

I find rose water very difficult to accommodate.    It's the floral equivalent of sage in its tendency to be boss.    Hermé's Ipsahan series is an example. 

Edited August 13, 2020 by Margaret Pilgrim (log)

[heidih]

10 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

Sounds good to me, except possibly for the amount of sugar.

 

 

I find the culture trends to sweet. Rose water I am cool with.

[paulraphael]

18 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

Sounds good to me, except possibly for the amount of sugar.

 

 

In these cases sometimes the best bet is to steal the flavor ideas and graft them on to your own base recipes. 

[Margaret Pilgrim]

1 hour ago, paulraphael said:

 

In these cases sometimes the best bet is to steal the flavor ideas and graft them on to your own base recipes. 

 

Well said.   This comes close to a universal truth in cooking.