Pumpkin ‘Pie’ Ice Cream
Spice Infusion
Water 1000g
Cloves
Nutmeg
Cinnamon
Ginger
Allspice/Mace
Roasted Pumpkin Puree
Pumpkin (diced) 500g
Sodium bicarbonate 1.25g
Water/Neutral Oil 20g
Ice Cream Base – 1kg
Spice Infusion 200g
Whole Milk 69g
Heavy Cream 75g
Roasted Pumpkin Puree 250g
Cream cheese 75g
Skim Milk Powder 40g
Egg Yolk 80g
Sucrose 40g
Dextrose 155g
Invert Sugar 10g
Sea Salt 3g
Stabilizer 2g
Dedicated to SirBadkon.
This week is a small pit stop before I attempt the Pumpkin Pie concept later next week. This week is a little bit more “Asian themed” and I hope there are some things which can be taken away from this post, particularly with illustration of how you can approach something in a number of ways. The red bean idea was drawn out into 3 different possibilities; all of which have a working version 1. I will update the post as pictures roll post churn but for now, it will remain as draft specs. I was supposed to have done a black sesame faux cream this week but I couldn’t find a paste up to standard so I will leave that for another day.
I’m sure that most people are familiar with the Maeda-en US brand. I think their green tea ice cream is really good but some of the others are a bit underwhelming especially the black sesame one. Others may disagree but I think the only positive point is the novelty factor and the fact that it is not in the catalogue of flavours from ‘bigger brands’. One thing that I would like to point out is that red beans aren’t even red when you make the paste so there’s no way you’ll get a pink ice cream if you use enough of the paste. Following on from that, the black sesame tasted like a fairly plain ice cream that happened to be grey. Colour me disappointed.
So a few things to note from here; red beans and their ‘fibre’ tend to turn into bricks when you harden the mix in the freezer and you will have a brown bean ice cream so don’t be too put off by the colour. There will be three formulations in this post and a bonus green tea (matcha) one:
The sorbet itself is a faux cream a la MC so it doesn’t abide by the standard rules but it requires a lot of sugar and I could only bring it to -14°C before it becomes unbearably sweet in order to maintain a suitable texture. This variation is fairly melt resistant and is very creamy when tempered without relying on a Pacojet. The red bean here is extremely frontal so it tastes like a concentrated red bean soup in dessert form.
The Red Bean Ice cream is a lightly flavoured (subjective) custard which is typical for most ice creams on this blog.
The ID Sherbet is a bit of a takeaway from the other two because it doesn’t have the red bean as a frontal flavour. Instead, the sherbet is sweetened with red bean paste. The strawberry is very dominant and you may need to temper for a good dose of the red bean (or adjust the scaling of red bean paste).
NOTE: ALL THE RED BEAN PASTE USED HERE IS SWEETENED!
Red Bean Sorbet @ -14C
Mineral Water 497.8g
Red Bean Paste 225g
Coconut Oil 60g
Dextrose 195g
Invert Sugar 15g
Lambda Carrageenan 2g
Locust Bean gum 3g
Polysorbate 80 0.2g
Salt 2g
You may choose to use a neutral oil here or a refined coconut oil with no odour. I would say that I prefer this one the least because it’s too frontal but there’s uses for min-maxed desserts on a restaurant plate.
Red Bean Ice Cream
Whole Milk 497g
Heavy Cream 120g
Red Bean Paste 100g
Skim Milk Powder 30g
Dextrose 180g
Invert Sugar 10g
Egg Yolk 60g
Stabilizer 3g
This is a super typical ice cream with 10% flavour weight. Not much more to say.
“Ichigo Daifuku Sherbet”
Strawberry Juice 454g
Red Bean Paste 100g
Natural Yogurt (neutral flavour) 200g
Heavy Cream 40g
Dextrose 190g
Maltodextrin 10g
Sorbet Stabiliser 4g
Malic Acid 2g
I loosely refer to this a sherbet because it is 2% fat with minimal milk solids. It is a re-imagining of a ‘reconstructed sherbet’ because instead of using low fat milk as the liquid base, strawberry juice is used instead and yogurt and cream to substitute for the fat. Red bean is a background flavour so it gets dominated very heavily and the paste is merely used a sweetener.
Green Tea Ice Cream
Whole Milk 561g
Heavy Cream 135g
Skim Milk Powder 30g
Matcha Tea Powder 15g
Sugar 25g
Dextrose 165g
Invert Sugar 15g
Egg Yolk 40g
Stabilizer 4g
Sodium Bisulfite (optional) 1g
Protip: The sodium bisulfite is to preserve the flavour of the green tea and prevent oxidation. You may choose to leave it out depending on the conditions of how you store the base or how long you decide to age it.
Sodium metabisulfite may be more accessible. In this case, make a solution with water and vent well. You will be left with the residual sodium bisulfite.
On transparency and ‘additives’
I think there will always be backlash with regards to stabilizers and whatnot for preserving food. This goes without saying that a lot of things are bad for you and can be consumed up to a certain tolerance level. Too much of anything is bad for you, in fact. But more and more people turn a blind eye to learning new things and immediately get disgusted when they hear or read something they don’t understand. Little do most people realize that there is hardly anything natural about ice cream or most food products we have in the first place. If you really think that your homogenized milk is udder to bottle or that sugar falls from trees, you need a reality check. If/when someone starts calling regular granulated sugar sucrose, it might have the same stigma as ‘atomised glucose’. Perhaps I should call xanthan gum thickening powder. Maybe there is some solace in the fact that I use scaling for hydrocolloids akin to a small seller or restaurant.
Right now, there are a lot of problems with conventional machinery, transport and storage for frozen products. The stabilizer aids us in counteracting defects and for the most part are extracted from plants such as seaweed/Irish moss. With greater control over every aspect of the process from manufacturing to packaging, movement and delivery to end user, I am sure a lot of these things can be taken out. But of course, the evil corporations are trying to save money and kill you by cutting corners. I’m sure all the top pastry chefs in the world are also cutting corners by using such things as hydrocolloids. It may be a bit of pedantry to get irritated at people attempting to undermine a movement which forges new ground or has become a requirement for maintaining quality but I think the proper answer is transparency.
As much as you have a choice for the ingredients that go into the things you make, the end user should also have a choice for whether they choose to consume the product or not. Transparency and letting everyone know what goes in is always necessary because it allows the user to make an informed decision as to whether they should eat it or not. As you may know, many big manufacturers already abide by this through legislation/lawmakers. However, here, there are some smaller sellers or even in different industries (non ice cream) that claim to be 100% natural but have zero information on their product. Honestly, I think this is even worse than the ‘evil corporations trying to kill you’. A lot of healthy superfoods or ‘natural purveyors’ are the real deal but for every one seller, there will probably be fifty selling you snake oil. If you have no toxic chemicals and whatnot, I’m sure your potential customers would be enthused to see your list of ingredients which are not likely to harm them in any way, shape or form. Instead, it is preferable to hide behind the moniker of ‘natural’ to evade accountability and transparency. I think this is disingenuous and borders on deceit. As always, keep an open mind (even on things which may be hard to understand).
Anyways, it’s time to wrap up this blog and hopefully the pumpkin pie will be ready next week.
Now I come to the huge pain in the ass part where I go over the more difficult ideas to present. For the purposes of a very complete concept, I try to abide by the following rules:
Tiramisu Ice Cream
This one is probably the most difficult to attempt purely because of the pastry involved and the multiple interpretations of the tiramisu. A tiramisu consists of:
The point of contention now is how authentic is authentic? In a sense, this dessert has suffered a pizza effect because the original tiramisu had no cooking involved apart from baking the biscuits and contained no egg whites, cream or liquor. So this ubiquitous dessert of which we are fond of became synonymous with liquor which betrays its origins. I propose two options which just vary the base. The savioardi has the option of being rolled into the concept or left out entirely so it can be eaten with a savioardi and espresso a la minute. Here are my constants:
Tiramisu – concept 1
Base : Zabaglione Ice Cream
Inclusions : Savioardi soaked in espresso + invert sugar, Tempered Chocolate Shard
Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream
Modernist Cuisine’s “Pumpkin Pie” dessert which is also not frozen. The custard is made using a carrageenan blend which is heat stable.
Another PITA which I really want to get at least the base rolled out before Thanksgiving even though no one celebrates it here. This plays once again into French custard territory because of the usual ingredients used in pumpkin pie. Instead of steeping the milk with spices, I will probably cold infuse water with pumpkin pie spice and incorporate extra cream instead. The pumpkin will be pressure cooked with sodium bicarbonate. Here is the idea for it:
Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream – concept 1
Base : Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream, Creme Fraiche “Sorbet”
Inclusions: Pie Pastry cooked with invert sugar and brushed with cocoa butter/coconut oil.
And that’s a wrap for the week. I will be working on a black sesame and red bean sorbet next until then. Any suggestions welcome!
Check out my previous post for a bit of extended background reading to this post. Please be warned that I wrote the Intelligent Design post at about 2am so there are issues with flow of reading around the midway point through the post. I found it rather difficult to keep it as concise as possible and the post is actually over 2000 words which is a lot to absorb in one sitting.
Following on that, I hope it represents a vague idea of the very open-ended possibilities for realizing an idea. With this post, I try to convert that to a more practical exercise with conceptualization. While there are many roads to take, setting clear goals and adhering to them using strict procedures and formulation allows you control the chaos of experimenting. In short, the idea should be freeform but the method to achieve them should be surgical. I have a lot of ideas in the pipeline and I am going to discuss them in order of completeness and complexity :
Ispahan Sorbet
The revered Ispahan sorbet will be a bit of a nod to Pierre Herme’s signature flavour and with lychee season coming up in full swing, this should be a great concept to take a crack at. There will be no real alteration to the idea itself. I won’t have the alcoholic rose essence from Sevarome which is very important but I do have organic rose petals to compensate for an infusion. I will be min maxing each fruit so the raspberry will be acidulated with lemon juice (citric acid) and pure malic acid while the lychee is more sweet. For obvious reasons, I will post a mock formulation because the flavour combination is already fleshed out:
Sorbet 1 : Lychee rose sorbet
Rose infused water 195g
Lychee Puree 500g
Sugar 50g
Dextrose 150g
Stabiliser 5g
Sorbet 2 : Raspberry sorbet
Mineral Water 328g
Raspberry Puree 400g
Lemon Juice 25g
Dextrose 200g
Maltodextrin 30g
Stabiliser 5g
Malic Acid 2g
Notes
The sorbets will be layered over each other in a flat rectangular container. This can then be decanted by scooping into a pint tub or manually scooped by the end user. Either way, both flavours swirl into the same scoop.
Nutella Banana
Fair use of image kthx.
BenJen are probably going to kill me for this but bananas and desserts can be very fickle. The major gripe that most people have with bananas is that the starch makes the mouthfeel and aftertaste very chalky. This can be counteracted by over-ripening, cooking out the starch which will eventually break down into simpler sugars or actually clarifying the banana puree into a clear juice using amylase. This will be a bit of an over the top concoction and I hope the very underrated banana will see some love. The base being a sorbet or sherbet is interchangeable. See below for the mock ideas:
Nutella Banana Sorbet Mock Idea 1
Base : Caramelized Banana Sorbet w/ Banana Juice as the base liquid
Inclusion : Nutella Ganache & Brownies, Banana Swirl
This is obviously the premium idea because the banana flavour is very pure. The ganache and brownies will be made with invert sugar. The banana swirl will be a fluid gel using banana juice and either thickened with pectin or my previously discovered agar/xanthan/locust bean gum hybrid mix. Easily the most time consuming to make and all components need to be checked separately before putting this together. I expect at least 3 versions of this before it gets anywhere close to a good standard of quality.
Nutella Banana Sorbet Mock Idea 2
Base : Caramelized or Fresh Banana Sorbet
Inclusion : Nutella Straciatella
The lazy man’s approach. Instant sorbet base, mix in some banana puree and whisk in microwaved nutella when the sorbet comes out of the ice cream machine
Nutella Banana Ice Cream Mock Idea 3
Base : Nutella Ice Cream
Inclusion : Nutella and Banana Bread
Inverse of the previous 2 ideas. My least preferred approach because Nutella is a spread and the last time I made a sandwich, I didn’t put more butter on it than salami.
Chocolate Sorbet
I really have nothing much to say about this because it will be a base for another idea in future called Death by Chocolate v2 of which I have yet to finalize any details of. For reference the last DBC I made was a 90% chocolate sorbet base, 70% ganache and tempered semi-sweet chocolate bits with fleur de sel. The quality of this one should be a lot higher but less bitter as I forgo Lindt’s supermarket range for Callebaut couverture and Valhrona’s cocoa powder. See below for the draft formulation for the chocolate sorbet:
Dark Chocolate Sorbet
Dark Chocolate Couverture (54.5% solids) 180g
Cocoa Powder (Valrhona) 40g
Dextrose 200g
Invert Sugar 60g
Mineral Water 516g
Stabilizer 5g
Ghirardrelli Brownie Ice Cream
Hold me for I cannot contain my excitement
Chocolate Brownie Ice Cream – the only concept
Base : Chocolate Brownie Ice Cream
Inclusion : Chocolate Brownie, Chocolate Fudge Sauce
All store bought here. Water and eggs will be added to the brownie mix. This brownie mix will be separated into a base infusion batch and an actual baking batch. The base infusion batch will be cooked en sous vide and remain moist while the baking batch will be mixed with invert sugar and smashed through the ice cream as it comes out of the machine.
Watch for Part 2!!
There will be a Pumpkin Pie and Tiramisu Ice Cream concept
To preface, I hope that anyone reading takes everything within this post with a grain of salt because it is an opinion post and nothing to do with Darwinism or anyone’s religious beliefs. The post itself will be split into two parts; this one will conceptual and the next one will be a drawing board of ideas in the pipeline.
It should go without saying that anyone with a keen interest on any topic would argue with some degree of passion and fervour about what is considered ‘good’ or ‘right’ about the subject in their opinion. Culinary should be no different. The concept of an ice cream is a sum of many concepts that have been inherited or learned through history and experience. When we reduce the idea of what a sorbet, ice cream or classification of any frozen dessert to very basic descriptions, we hope to create some semblance of what characteristics we should expect. For example, an ice cream should be: cold, creamy, sweet, smooth and indulgent etc. This is typically an amalgamation of milk, cream, sugar and eggs. Ok, maybe we sometimes use eggs.
You would think that over a long period of time with a rich history of the product and proliferation through so many cultures and rigorous studies, we would have somehow attained some sort of culinary utopia. Alas, many people are still kept in the dark. And I really don’t mean to be obnoxious but I sense that there is a huge gap between a very novice hobbyist and very novice ice cream maker with some degree of experience on a professional level. Frozen desserts by their nature are a very unnatural product so the ideas behind producing them can be rather discouraging to a total beginner. Again, I don’t mean to shit on anyone’s parade but I have to be very honest about why I try very hard to improve.
Compared to someone in the business or a distinguished pastry school background, I have no knowledge of procedures, no experience, no finesse, little availability of amazing purveyors for food products and generally much much poorer equipment. In no way, shape or form do I expect to make anything of the same quality that people in haute cuisine restaurants or say the Gelato Messinas or Salt and Straws of the world do. If I come close, that’s a huge achievement in itself. So why bother trying? For starters, it’s pretty fun. Another thing that is very obvious is how open ended a culinary platform is. There are many applications and ideas for the base product which have been introduced and those that have yet to be seen. While some people are going goo goo over their very ‘been there done that’ triple choc fudge brownie from their favourite place, you are the hit of the party with your Gingersnap Honey Apricot Sherbet w/ some exotic swirl of some ingredient no one can pronounce. So, perhaps what I meant to say is that despite the fact that you may be hindered by technological and knowledge-based hurdles which would make an equivalent product far inferior to that of your favourite brand, your endeavours are meritorious by exploration of new ideas or a wildly discombobulated configuration of currently popular ones.
In an attempt to bridge the gap between complete beginner and amateur, I tried to explore ideas from professional chefs or books from ice cream parlours. It might seem like great advances were made in understanding of the subject at first but I turned out to be pretty wrong. The problems are now compounded because while everyone can agree on their idea of what the ice cream should be (cold, creamy, smooth etc), they all have different ideas of exactly what each quality should be or even how they should approach their respective combination of milk, cream, eggs (sometimes) and sugar. But not all is lost, because I learnt how to make some fly stuff along the way and there are some things which you can add to your understanding.
False Dichotomy of Design
The Pizza Effect of no apparent origin
Historically, the first frozen dessert may have very well been truly been discovered in China in the form of flavoured snow. Italy is well known for its gelato. A French chef who made custard for royalty and spun it in some medieval contraption may have been the creator of the French custard base we see nowadays. Indians have a very rich and dense kulfi and the Turks their chewy salep.
As seen here, French custard and eggless bases or gelato don’t even have their own exact recipes for success and now we introduce even more breadth to the interpretation of our favourite frozen dairy. While I have bastardized the use of the term ‘pizza effect’, it seems clear that through different cultures ideas can be transformed and this should only serve as a breeding ground for new ideas or a fusion of preexisting ones.
The ‘One True Approach’
Here we have a set of well known and successful ice cream purveyors and pastry chefs who can’t seemingly agree on an exact set of conditions for a well made ice cream with regards to nutritional composition, hydrocolloid usage or even procedures. Maybe Tyler and Jeni don’t know what they’re doing? Maybe Migoya and Laiskonis are wrong? Maybe they are all wrong and we should throw out all their knowledge and expertise? Perhaps I should be a stalwart intellectual and pick a side.
A very ‘uninquiring mind’ would probably be predisposed to pick a camp and say that this one approach is the be all and end all. I think the real answer lies in the notion that ‘the right idea’ has no mutually exclusive set of conditions. They illustrate a great degree of variance in what produces something successful and their approach suits their intents and purposes for what they are making.
Can everyone’s clothes be colour coded by day so I can decide what to wear within the next 2 hours?
Elegance vs Indulgence
We now delve further into finished or ‘plated’ concepts. With regards to the more popular strand of thought regarding ice cream or the Euro-American express, you would be very well acquainted with a very different type of heavy-handedness in the approach to how certain ice cream products are designed. It is not a surprise to hear of some American brands (and some European ones too) with a ton of inclusions. Every flavour has to be accompanied by a swirl, mix in and nuts or some other confectionery that borders on gluttony. In fact, Ben & Jerry’s is well known for this because one of the two founders literally has no sense of smell and diminished taste. This sounds awesome right? I get to not only have ice cream but a brownie and a fudge spun into the same flavourful bite.
All is well and I decide I want something a bit different. On this hypothetical acid trip, I happen to go to a haute cuisine, hypothetical Michelin-starred restaurant and my only frozen component of the dessert is a…Blackcurrant sorbet (and a plain one at that). I must be very deflated now because I just had the best chocolate ice cream with a brownie and fudge on it.
I don’t even know what’s going on in this plate. Douglas Fir and Mango with Blackcurrant Sorbet by Heston Blumenthal
This is a very well known multi-sensory approach to plated desserts because it includes a variety of textures and temperatures. The flavours are very clean and well set out without crowding the palate. Sounds like a whole lot of snobbery, I suppose. While I don’t think it is very fair to compare a mass manufactured product to something hand made for a single service out of The Fat Duck, there is obviously some merit to inclusions. A regular ice cream parlour or hobbyist has no expertise, time or energy to work through the fine details of the endless possibilities of mousse, gelee, foams, granitas, fluid gels, tuiles, cakes, biscuits and edible dirt to rival the concept on the plate. The only resolution is to make do with what is possible and practical. As goes for supermarket ice cream. Perhaps this is just a marriage of convenience?
And there are some days where we all like our plain vanilla or blackcurrant sorbet, no frills. For clarification, I prefer to keep bases on this blog simple because they can be extended from there. I don’t believe in using inclusions to cover a bad base to begin with so the starting point should be the base itself. You can always add whatever twist onto it later.
Breaking ground
‘Steak tartare’ featuring Bearnaise ice cream by Wylie Dufresne
I’m in a weird part of the world again. Of course, we have to cover the stranger part of the ice cream world where savoury meets sweet. In this case, the cold theme of dish is where the ice cream lends it characteristics and texture to a re-imagining of a classic dish.
The ice cream is usually very rich and used to great effect. It is not something which you would typically binge on but it showcases a different side to your usual flavours. Other examples would include Mustard Ice Cream, Bacon and Egg Ice Cream, Edamame Ice Cream, Foie Gras Ice Cream, White Chocolate (slightly less sweet) with Caviar.
Where do we go from here?
Back to the drawing board obviously. I don’t mean to deter anyone from pursuing a hobby or over complicate what some prefer to keep simple but it should rattle a hobbyist to be excited by new things. Perhaps this helps some budding enthusiasts to exploit their creative freedom and learn not to follow a single line of thought because there doesn’t appear to be one. In this topic particularly, there seems to be many teachers.
Addendum – Gap City
Here is some very very general advice for starting out.
Degrees of detail
One thing you may notice with professional recipes and beginner home-made ones is the specificity of the ingredient composition. While you may be used to cups, tablespoons and teaspoons, a lot of the professional ones go by weight. This is generally much cleaner and more accurate because 100g of sugar is 100g of sugar while 4 tablespoons of sugar in the US might be different from 4 tablespoons in another part of the world and I haven’t even gotten to the part where we should decide if it’s an even tablespoon or a heaped one.
Some folks might think this borders on pedantry but weight, much like cups or tablespoons are a unit of measurement. Just because there’s more digits next to it doesn’t mean it’s elitist. Putting 3 cups of milk is still maintaining a good degree of accuracy; it’s just not as accurate.
Pass the e4xx
Some recipes include hydrocolloids and some don’t. It’s a matter of preference and I’m sure there are many posts out there in the world that advocate or denigrate the use of stabilizers. It is immensely helpful in keeping products and depending on your circumstances, usage of stabilizers can be warranted. I can make a big post on it at some point but people should be open minded about their usage as long as the people consuming them know what’s inside. Only carrageenan will wreck some people’s stomachs so you can use a different blend if needs be. In general, if you have better machinery and control of service periods, they can be omitted.
Procedure
There are too many approaches in this regard to describe but in general, ice cream and sorbet bases are made on the stove top because of how well all the ingredients dissolve when heated. Heating milk proteins in a controlled manner also improves foaming capabilities.
Always make sure you are min-maxing the machine you are using and your storage space for hardening. All equipment should be as cold as possible. You should freeze the containers if possible and store the hardening product towards the back of the freezer. Avoid getting foreign water sources into the mix because it seeds larger crystals.
highlyexperimentalsite 