Blast chillers

[andrewk512]

Ordered my BF100 today, super excited

[wannabechocolatier]

On 6/9/2021 at 7:12 PM, andrewk512 said:

Ordered my BF100 today, super excited

How has it been so far for you?

[andrewk512]

On 7/30/2021 at 6:58 PM, wannabechocolatier said:

How has it been so far for you?

 

I am terrible at following up on posts, sorry.

 

I have mixed opinions. The largest barrier to me using it repeatedly is the time it takes to set up - it takes about 20 minutes for the machine to cool its chamber from room temp to -36C. Most things I use it for are things I want to freeze more rapidly, so I need it to be below -18C fast for it to make more sense than using my regular freezer. If I was using it to simply /cool/ a lot of products, I think this would be more of a non-issue. A lot of times I want to use it but by the time I think of it it is not really going to be more effective than just throwing it in the fridge/freezer at that point.

 

I use it a ton for ice creams, I have a freezer-bowl machine so I take the pre-frozen bowl at -18C from my main freezer and cool it to -36C in the blast chiller. I then churn my base and stick the base in the blast chiller to rapidly bring down the temp. It is nice for this.

 

It is nice to throw in some hot pots of liquid and cool them fast too, without bothering with an ice bath cause I have no equipment to produce large volumes of ice.

 

I have also been able to use it to assist with various niche products - this week I made the EMP recipe Milk & Honey which requires pushing a nitro frozen honey sphere into the center of a sphere of milk sorbet, keeping all of my ingredients super cold by chucking assorted things into the blast chiller while I was in the middle of steps was really nice so as to not risk them melting at critical times.

 

It is also awesome to chill warm bottles of alcohol last minute

 

If I had the money and space I would get the mid-sized chiller, simply because then I could also rapidly chill plates last minute

[wannabechocolatier]

6 hours ago, andrewk512 said:

 

I am terrible at following up on posts, sorry.

 

I have mixed opinions. The largest barrier to me using it repeatedly is the time it takes to set up - it takes about 20 minutes for the machine to cool its chamber from room temp to -36C. Most things I use it for are things I want to freeze more rapidly, so I need it to be below -18C fast for it to make more sense than using my regular freezer. If I was using it to simply /cool/ a lot of products, I think this would be more of a non-issue. A lot of times I want to use it but by the time I think of it it is not really going to be more effective than just throwing it in the fridge/freezer at that point.

 

I use it a ton for ice creams, I have a freezer-bowl machine so I take the pre-frozen bowl at -18C from my main freezer and cool it to -36C in the blast chiller. I then churn my base and stick the base in the blast chiller to rapidly bring down the temp. It is nice for this.

 

It is nice to throw in some hot pots of liquid and cool them fast too, without bothering with an ice bath cause I have no equipment to produce large volumes of ice.

 

I have also been able to use it to assist with various niche products - this week I made the EMP recipe Milk & Honey which requires pushing a nitro frozen honey sphere into the center of a sphere of milk sorbet, keeping all of my ingredients super cold by chucking assorted things into the blast chiller while I was in the middle of steps was really nice so as to not risk them melting at critical times.

 

It is also awesome to chill warm bottles of alcohol last minute

 

If I had the money and space I would get the mid-sized chiller, simply because then I could also rapidly chill plates last minute

 

No worries, I had forgotten I had even sent it!

 

So, in total, would you say that it has just made things more convenient for you vs a traditional freezer or would you say that there is also an improvement in the product?

[andrewk512]

1 hour ago, wannabechocolatier said:

 

No worries, I had forgotten I had even sent it!

 

So, in total, would you say that it has just made things more convenient for you vs a traditional freezer or would you say that there is also an improvement in the product?

 

Improvement in ice cream for sure, although I'd have to do a side-by-side to determine the full extent of it.

 

Everything else has been convenience

 

It's not at the top of my list of essential cooking equipment but I don't regret it either

[paulraphael]

On 8/27/2021 at 1:27 PM, andrewk512 said:

I use it a ton for ice creams, I have a freezer-bowl machine so I take the pre-frozen bowl at -18C from my main freezer and cool it to -36C in the blast chiller. I then churn my base and stick the base in the blast chiller to rapidly bring down the temp. It is nice for this.

 

I'm surprised this works! I use the freezer bowl attachment for a KA mixer, and chill it in the regular freezer (kept at around -20C). This gives a residence time of 7 to 10 minutes (total time of churning, down to a drawing temperature of -5 to -7C). 

 

Once I tried using the "quick freeze" feature on our freezer ... a button you can push if you have to put something big and not fully chilled into the freezer. It drops the temperature down to around -26C for a few hours. When I did this, the mix froze so fast that dasher completely jammed. It has a spring-loaded clutch to keep the mixer from ripping it to shreds, which is exactly what would have happened without it. I could not turn the dasher even a millimeter with my hands. This was a failed experiment!