Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: satisfied

What I Have Learned About Making Ice Cream

One of my summer hobbies is making ice cream. I have a knack for it -- an instinct for combining ingredients in ways that work. But I'm keenly interested in figuring out how and why they work. I know somewhat of kitchen chemistry for cooking, like the difference between oil and butter in cookies; but there's precious little written on how ingredients behave when you freeze them! I like figuring out flavors and textures and such. Some things I'm learning...

* Ice cream recipes with acidic ingredients (like fruit) take longer to freeze than those without. This is an application of a well-known effect, but you won't find it in ice cream instructions.

* Evaporated milk lends a lovely rich, velvety texture to ice cream. In chocolate ice cream, the flavor is divine. In vanilla ice cream ... well, it tasted to me like vanilla-flavored evaporated milk, which is not quite what I was aiming for. My taste-testers this afternoon adored it, though. I think I'll save the evaporated milk for stronger savory flavors. But if you like the way evaporated milk tastes, by all means try it in ice cream. It would probably work great with mocha.

* The texture depends a lot on the fat content. I use various combinations of whole milk, half-and-half, and heavy whipping cream usually. Evaporated milk is new this year. I used coconut milk once. The heavier the ice cream, the less people eat at once, and the more satisfying it is. The chocolate batch was done with evaporated milk and heavy cream, and was like a frozen truffle: dense, mind-blowing, and impossible to eat more than a little of.

* Real vanilla beans have the kind of complexity of aroma that wine snobs describe. It is far more than you get in extract -- like comparing an orchestra to a quartet. There's a strong middle note of vanilla like a bassoon, and a bitter grumbling undertone like drums, and sharp honking oboe notes of something like almond. The last note that lingers after the others fade is not a low note, as with most aromas, but rather a high sweet floral smell: the delicate flute song of the orchid flower itself, preserved in the bean. Which was entirely worth the $2.99 I paid for it, the five minutes it took me to cut it out of the plastic wrap (what did they think it was going to do, knock up the nutmeg?), and the additional five minutes it took to dissect it and get the pieces into the cream.
Tags: food
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  • 2 comments

Anonymous

June 13 2007, 09:57:01 UTC 14 years ago

We've discovered that soy ice cream isn't as good as it might sound. We made a batch of Chocolate Peanut Butter Tofu Ice Cream with soy milk, and it was all right, but ultimately unsatisfying. The tofu is supposed to substitute for the fat in the milk, but I don't think it does a very good job, and the whole mixture freezes way too hard.

I think ice cream is supposed to be sweet and full of fat. =)

Ceallaigh
je_reviens

je_reviens

June 13 2007, 21:52:10 UTC 14 years ago

yum.

I like frozen custard.mmmmm.