Intelligent Design

Yea right

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.

Oh India

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’

1. XX contemporary chef says we have to use eggs but Jeni says it interferes with the taste
2. XX says don’t use stabilizers but Y uses it and Jeni says we should use starch.
3. Tyler Malek and Jeni say use ~14% butterfat but all the other chefs use 2-10%
4. Should I use flavouring to keep the texture of the cream intact or use actual fruit?
5. Should I use tea or steeped milk?
6. Migoya says to add the cream at X time but Michael Laiskonis says add it while you’re cooling the base.
7. X and Y say pasteurise at 85C while others say to boil or hold at 75C for longer.
8. Corvitto says use 6g of stabiliser but Migoya says 3.6g

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.

Would smash all four

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.