haagen daaz five, and other notes on ice cream

Do you know why Haazen Daaz new Five campaign is such a brilliant idea? Five ingredients are all you really need to make most flavors of ice cream. Five simple ingredients:

egg yolks
sugar
milk
cream
real flavoring: see vanilla beans, zest, coffee beans, cardamom pods

Oh and, sure, a pinch of salt will amp up the flavor balance on most ice creams. For chocolate ice cream you'll need some combination of cocoa and chocolate (or butter and chocolate) so that is more than five but you get the point.

Ice cream relies on a certain amount of fat for its creamy taste. The fat can be composed of egg yolks, cream, milk or half and half and every chef has a recipe they prefer. For a long time I was stuck on Claudia Fleming's ratio of one cup cream, three cups milk and twelve yolks, but the amount of sugar she calls for was too high for some flavors.

Gritty or icy tasting ice creams may not have a high enough percentage of fat, they may contain shards of fruit that attracts ice molecules when freezing, or they may have melted and refrozen to give it a strange texture. Companies like Ben and Jerry's add emulsifiers to the ice cream so that you'll have a fairly scoopable product the minute you take it out of the freezer. If you've ever wondered why Haagen Daaz is always rock hard, it's because there are no emulsifiers in the product. Emulsifiers for the most part aren't creepy or bad or gross like other additives to processed food. Some are made of seaweed.

Some people add things like milk powder or gelatin to ice creams or sorbets to improve the texture. Gelatin affects the sorbet or ice cream base while spinning and prevents the formation of ice crystals. You can "cheat" the natural formula by reducing the fat content and adding gelatin to ice creams to prevent the crystallization that happens when not enough fat is present in a base. You can also cheat by adding a couple tablespoons of alcohol, which will keep the ice cream softer.

I like to keep my ice cream pretty simple and only booze it up if I'm going for a boozy flavor. Ice cream can be deceptive with all those additives. You can't taste gelatin in a product, though you can sometimes taste milk powder if the ice cream is a pretty weak flavor.

(n)ice milk

The peppermint cookie ice milk turned out a lot better.

Still a little iciness/graininess to the texture, but it scoops really well and the creaminess dominates the ice taste. I'd like to try someone else's ice milk, because I feel like by its nature (having the same sweetness as ice cream, but less milkfat) it's got to be grainy. Ice cream depends on milk, yolks and sugar in order to have a smooth and creamy mouthfeel. Taking away one of those while not altering the others, doesn't that have to mean grainy? You know, that frostbitten taste...

Sweet Adeline looks really good. I might try to go there after my appointment in Berkeley today. That or head over to the gourmet ghetto and the cupcake place upstairs on the corner where the Peet's by the Chez Panisse is (love the vagueness of directions from my boss), and pick up some nice bread from Acme so that I can make sandwiches to take to work for lunch.

Vietnamese food in Oakland tonight with the roommates.

citrus sorbets

aaah,a tip, from the archives of Shuna Lydon's blog I just can't seem to stop reading even though it's growing late.

It is best to eat citrus sorbets soon after they are churned. They tend to freeze rock-solid.

{If you find that this is true, "temper" your sorbet in your refrigerator for about 20 minutes or as long as it takes to come to desired temperature.}

On a similar note, I noticed my strawberry ice milk was also better/softer after about ten minutes of sitting out. When initially removed from the freezer, I could barely scoop it but ten minutes later the iciness was mostly gone and it had a rather creamy mouthfeel after all.

I made a second batch of ice milk tonight that had been doctored with 3T peppermint schnapps and, when mostly frozen, chopped thin mint cookies. Pissed off after the strawberry experiment I figured the extra sugar would help it freezer better. We'll taste the results tomorrow.

I'm going for Vietnamese food in Oakland tomorrow night, for someone's birthday party. I have to be in Berkeley tomorrow afternoon--maybe I'll stop by Sweet Adeline's or the Berkeley bowl or somewhere I probably won't get back to once I move to SF.

I really like Shuna's blog, and I really hope that she writes me back and that I can help with one of her cooking classes. I feel like I'm always struggling to learn more or better but I don't have other people I can bring that dialogue back to. Not even the pastry girls, really. Sometimes, sure, but not really. In culinary school I wasn't caring about the whys of what I was doing so much, so I think they'd be really surprised at me...if they knew I got Food Arts and ate at all the best restaurants I could (not) afford to go to, and arranged unpaid stages with amazing chefs and relocated my whole life for food, if they knew I made lists and try to really understand the thing (cardamom. sorbet base. dough.), well, do they do the same thing? I don't know.

beard awards

Ana Sortun's Spice cookbook is nominated for a Beard! I didn't realize that...I hope they get it because I really love that cookbook. But it's up against Claudia Roden's book Arabesque and it's sort of weird, they have one category for Asian food and then a whole other category that's just International.

I'm going to make reservations at one of the local nominated places for when my mother comes out, and I think I'm going to take my friend to Delfina when she comes in June. The chef at A16's nominated for Rising Star (and is up against David Chang, and Patrick Connolly from Radius and the guy from Eleven Madison Park). So we could go there or Jardiniere (has Traci des Jardins really not won a Beard yet?), or Quince, or Delfina which I'm saving for Leah because I think she'd like to go there and then go to the Lex afterward. Still want to go to Boulevard and Slanted Door and...and...

I made this weirdly disappointing strawberry ice milk yesterday. I made a giant base which only called for 4 yolks per 4.6 c. milk (which I boosted up to 6 yolks), and 1 c. sugar. Split the base in half, made half strawberry with some sugared and pureed strawberry and it came out kind of grainy. So, was it the liquid in the strawberries that made it grainy, or was the base not fat enough or was it not sweet enough, because one cup of sugar seems low for all that dairy plus there isn't a lot of fat from the eggs. The rest of the batch is going to be peppermint cookies and cream and I have some peppermint schnapps here, so the alcohol could help make it not come out grainy, or there's some rosemary simple syrup kicking around the fridge. Double checked my baking book and it could be any of those things--not enough sugar, milk fat or yolks, but which one? Oh, ice milk. According to wikipedia, it has the same sugar content as ice cream but less dairy fat. But I assume ice milk is not supposed to be grainy. The Gourmet recipe also called for 2 T cornstarch which I guess is what, a preservative to keep it from turning grainy? Maybe the containers are just really not airtight and so ice crystals are getting in. All I know is Claudia Fleming's ratios work just fine for me, so maybe this is my first and last experimentation with ice milk and I'll just go back to my 3/4 milk and one dozen yolks, and one of these days buy the Gramercy Tavern cookbook (along with the Tartine cookbook, and the Citizen Cake cookbook whenever it comes out).

Hopefully the schnapps will boost up the second batch but if not I'll be on hand with the simple syrup and with any luck it's be smooth thin mint ice cream!

Tomorrow at work I'm rolling out the David Lebovitz orange poppy cookies, and making strawberry meringues with lemon marmelade, doing more strawberry lavender tart prep and pastry cream and new upside down cakes, and working with tart shells.