at Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:38:12 GMT in <[email hidden]>,
[email hidden] (Kate Connally) wrote :
Quoted message said:Alex Rast said:
at Wed, 16 Jun 2004 19:27:23 GMT in
<[email hidden]>, [email hidden] (Kate
Connally) wrote :
Quoted message said:Alex Rast wrote:
...
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Quoted message said:> Personally, I also think most fruit ice creams are a
> little better eggless, ...
Personally, I think the only way to make ice cream is
the cooked custard method - that is, with eggs!
... Lots of fat is what make good texture in
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Quoted message said:ice cream and eggs make for richness of flavor.
I disagree: IMHO there's a balance of fat, hovering about
10-12%, that makes for an ideal texture. Too much fat and
the ice cream becomes leaden, brick-solid, and greasy -
the texture of Haagen-Dasz, which IMHO has one of the
worst textures of any ice cream.
IMNSHO Haagen Dasz has the perfect texture of any ice cream
and all without resorting to weird additives - just milk,
cream, egg, and whatever (strawberry has always been my
favorite - it tastes exactly like my grandmother's homemade
ice cream except the texture is better.
This is the source of our divergence. Different tastes and
opinions on texture. If you prefer that particular texture,
then my comments wouldn't by and large apply.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:It seems to be a product of marketroid-oriented thinking
... that if some fat is good, more must be better, and if
less air is good, very little if any must be better.
I totally disagree. The fat is what gives the mouth feel.
.... I've known that is *way* before Haagen Dasz existed,
having been a connoisseur of ice cream my whole life.
Yes, this is a clear difference in personal preference. If
you like an ice cream with a higher fat, there's no reason
not to make that type in preference.
Quoted message said:I never much cared for "store-bought" ice creams until
Haagen Dasz came around, mainly for their lack of a
decent mouth feel in spite of all the texturizing
additives like carageenan and guar gum and others of
that ilk.
I agree that store-bought ice creams before the era of the
"Super- premiums" weren't especially good. And on balance,
the super-premium brands did represent an improvement over
what had previously been available. But for my taste, they
still weren't great - because they went towards the too
dense, too hard, too greasy, for my taste. There was one ice
cream brand that had what IMHO was the perfect balance -
Cascadian Farm. However, they seem to have discontinued
national distribution (you can still get their ice cream on
the farm stand itself)
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Hence you get the Haagen-Dasz block - ice cream you have
to chisel out. It only stands to reason.
Why would you have to chisel it out? If it's kept at the
proper temperature for ice cream it shouldn't be too hard.
But given that most home refrigerator freezers are not set
for proper ice cream temp all you have to do is zap it in
the microwave for 15-20 seconds and it becomes perfectly
scoopable and the correct "hardness" for eating and
enjoying the maximum flavor.
But any time you use any heating device to "soften" ice
cream (including setting it out on the counter), you're
going to get uneven heating, and generally some melting.
Personally, I prefer no melted ice cream whatsoever. (Yes,
this means using a chilled bowl, and in the case of eating
it out of the container, wrapping paper towel around the
container so that the heat of your hands won't melt the ice
cream). I've not encountered any of the super-premiums, kept
in any form of sub-freezing sotrage, not to be virtually block-
solid. My freezer isn't particularly cold - certainly not at
the real deep freeze level some people keep theirs at.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:If you remove all the air and increase the fat to its
logical limit
- 100% - what you'll have is frozen butter. Not exactly
the most appealing thing.
No one ever suggested doing anything even remotely like
that. And besides there are other components to ice cream
besides air and fat. Now you're just being ridiculous.
I was just pointing out that making a broad assertion like
"more fat is better" must clearly have limits, because since
at some point more fat must not be better, since the most
fat you could ever have would be 100%. The hypothetical
situation is deliberately ridiculous, to show the limits
most clearly.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Thus clearly there is some optimum ratio. Most people
concede, once they've tried a good Italian ice cream,
that the texture there is far better, and Italian ice
creams tend towards about 10% fat and somewhere in the
range of 25-35% air, where H-D is about 20% fat and 14%
air. A commercial ice cream is usually about 15% fat and
50% air.
I've had some excellent gelatos. Don't know or care what
the fat to air ratio is. But I still say Haagen Dasz has
the perfect texture.
Indeed, if you prefer the texture of Haagen Dasz over a good
gelato, there's no reason not to make your ice cream this
way. You've got to make what you like, not what others tell
you you should enjoy.
Quoted message said:Again - don't know or care about the fat/air ratio. But
whatever it is they do works for me. In my experience
more fat is better, within, of course, reason.
This is what I meant with the frozen butter example. Where
does that point of "reason" lie? Why not determine what for
you is the optimum percentage, rather than say "more fat is
better" - which doesn't give you very clear guidelines for
perfecting your recipes according to your preferences?
...
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:
If you use a highly fatty substance like chocolate (about
40% fat, in general), or nuts (anywhere from 60-90% fat,
that's going to tilt the fat content sky-high, so you
want to add eggs to reduce the fat down into a more
appropriate proportion....
...
Quoted message said:
Again, I reiterate that your logic seems backward to me. If
you're making a nut butter and adding it to the base, then
using eggs makes it contain even more fat and you've just
finished preaching against too much fat???
No, because it's a question of *relative* amounts. An egg
doesn't contain pure fat, it also contains plenty of protein
and water. So when you add an egg to an ice cream, you're
going to increase the total amount of substance. If the
percentage of fat in whatever you added the eggs to was more
than the percentage of fat in the eggs, the net effect will
be a reduction in the overall fat percentage of the combined
mix. Meanwhile, if you started with a lower percentage of
fat in what you added the eggs to, then the overall
percentage of fat would go up. However, in no case could the
eggs increase the total fat percentage above their own
natural percentage of fat. An egg, btw, has about 9% fat so
this would be the fat percentage limit that you could
achieve with eggs.
Quoted message said:It would seem to me that if you're trying to keep total
fat at certain level then you would use an eggless base
for nuts and chocolate since they bring a lot of fat to
the mix.
In order to use an eggless base, and actually reduce the fat
content, it would have to be almost entirely milk. However,
that doesn't work because chocolate and nut butters won't
emulsify in milk. They *will* emulsify in custard, however,
and this is why you really do have to use eggs. In other
words, the benefits of eggs for fatty flavourings is that
they are more effective at emulsifying the fat for their own
fat ratio.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:Quoted message said:... you can make perfectly good vanilla ice cream with
real vanilla extract.
... the taste with real vanilla beans is so much more
intense and so much better that there's no excuse not to
use a vanilla bean.
Yeah, if you want to mortgage your house to buy a vanilla
bean. Do you know how much those things cost???? Yikes!!!!!
$ 1.59 in the bulk bins at my local co-op. And the beans are
super-fresh and plump. Even if they were up at $5-6, I would
consider this a relatively trivial expense (after all, how
much, really, is $5.00?) unless I were literally making industrial-
scale quantities of vanilla ice cream every day. In that
situation, the effect of relative price might be significant
and start to cost in the thousands of dollars or more. But I
don't really look at $5.00 as too much to pay, once I've
decided to go the extra mile to make my own ice cream. Put
another way - if I'm not willing to pay, say, $5.00 for a
vanilla bean, I might just as well buy a better premium ice
cream and not bother making it at home at all.
Quoted message said::-P Sorry, I guess my totally unsophisticated taste buds
just don't measure up. After I'm one of those low class
slobs who don't like caviar and truffles. So I guess it's
to be expected that I would be perfectly happy using
vanilla extract in my overly fat-laden, eggy ice cream.
I wasn't implying that extract is lowbrow, or that the
reason not to use it is basically one of having a blue-
collar mentality. What I meant is that it makes little
*economic* sense. At the point where the cost of a vanilla
bean looms that large, it's probably more cost-effective to
buy a good ice cream from the store.
--
Alex Rast [email hidden] (remove d., .7,
not, and .NOSPAM to reply)
