Pacojet Competitor? The Ninja Creami

[weinoo]

51 minutes ago, horseflesh said:

If the output sucks once I spin it, I will amend this post and confess. 

 

And also realize that AI isn't the answer to everything!

[horseflesh]

I cannot edit my previous post with the mango sorbet recipe scaled to the Deluxe, but I just spun it on Sorbet mode and it came out well. 

 

[ElsieD]

3 minutes ago, horseflesh said:

I cannot edit my previous post with the mango sorbet recipe scaled to the Deluxe, but I just spun it on Sorbet mode and it came out well. 

 

 

I can but frozen mango puree with nothing added.  Do you think that would work?

[horseflesh]

1 minute ago, ElsieD said:

I can but frozen mango puree with nothing added.  Do you think that would work?

 

I'd give it a try. If the ingredients are just mangoes, then by weight it should be the same as my frozen chunks that I pureed myself. 

 

If there is any added water you might want to try reducing the water added in this recipe, hard to say by how much though. 

[horseflesh]

I've been using Ruben Porto's "Tres Leche" recipe a lot, adding modifications. It seems like a really good base recipe for the Creami. I scaled the recipe to use one full can of sweetened condensed milk, yielding 40 oz of ice cream base, which I split into two 20 oz Creami Deluxe beakers. It's shy of a 24 oz Deluxe beaker, but it also gives room for add-ins. (My full base recipe is one full 397 g can of sweetened condensed milk plus 507 g Costco whole milk, plus 366 g Costco heavy cream.)

 

3.8% w/w cocoa powder turns it into a nice chocolate ice cream. (24.1 g in 20 fl oz base)

 

PB2 peanut butter powder makes a good peanut butter ice cream. I have used both 6 tablespoons PB2, and 4 tablespoons plus 1 mL of McCormick Vanilla Butter Nut flavor (sold for baking). The more PB2 powder you add, the more the consistency changes... Even 6 tablespoons is still OK, more than that may be pushing it. 

 

I also tried adding about 100 g cherries to the base. This made a clear cherry flavor, but it was not strong enough to carry it on its own, and adding more cherries increased the batch size too much, and would have compromised creaminess as we're getting far away from the correct sugar/fat ratio. I meant to back it up with cherry flavor extract, but I accidentally picked up the Blackberry instead of Black Cherry bottle. This was a happy accident because the cherry/blackberry result was extremely tasty. 

 

0.590 mL pistachio extract in 20 fl oz base made a fantastic pistachio ice cream. I mixed in some chopped pistachio nuts. Loved it. 

 

The flavors I am using come from Apex Flavors, they are wonderful. They are broken up by category, some are sold for beverages, some for baking, some for ice cream, but I have had good luck breaking the rules.  

 

My last batch also used a stabilizer for the first time. Chris Young commented on ice cream stabilizers in an old ChefSteps thread... I'm going to copy it all here because it's good info that should not be lost. 
 

Quote

 

Some typical ice cream stabilizer approaches:

Locust bean gum or guar gum: 0.15% to 0.2% relative to the weight of the base
PLUS
kappa-carrageenan at 0.01% to 0.015% relative to the weight of the base

OR

200 bloom gelatin at 0.15% to 0.25%

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A common blend is a blend of xanthan, locust bean gum (or guar gum), and iota carrageenan. Note, you need to use this blend as a combination, they work in concert, and the xanthan or locust bean gum on their own will actually destabilize the ice cream. I've used a 1:1:1 blend at a total addition level of 0.1 to 0.2 % to the weight of the ice cream.

####
If you can use gelatin, it's a really good stabilizer at 0.1% (note the rate discrepancy)

####
If you add locust bean gum to cream (say, 0.5%) and then let the cream sit, you'll discover it causes the cream to separate over a day or two (you can speed this up with a centrifuge, a trick we show in Modernist Cuisine). IIRC, the reason is that the LBG displaces casein proteins from the surface of the fat globules, which causes them to start to coalesce into big globs of pure dairy fat. But LBG and xanthan gum together, or guar gum and xanthan together have a really great synergistic effect for thickening and gelling with a nice mouthfeel. It turns out that if you add kappa carrageenan to the mixture, then you avoid the problem. 

 

 

What I did was mix up the suggested 1:1:1 locust bean gum, iota carageenan, and xanthan gum. I applied it to the Tres Leche base at 0.15% w/w. Because LBG needs heat, and iota carageenan needs heat and ideally the absence of sugar, I hydrated this mix in just the milk portion of the ice cream base recipe. I picked 170F for 20 minutes--easy thanks to my Control Freak. Then, I blended the base together. 

 

The LIX stabilizer seemed to improve the mouth feel of the final ice cream a bit, and it also noticeably helped to slow melting. I would say my first batch of Tres Leche ice cream (berry flavor), plus 0.15% LIX stabilizer, was the first batch of ice cream I have made that I feel was around commercial quality.