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Alex Rast
 
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Default Ice Cream Question???

at Wed, 16 Jun 2004 19:27:23 GMT in >,
(Kate Connally) wrote :

>Alex Rast wrote:
>
>> Some ice creams (such as the rose ice cream I alluded to) *must* be
>> eggless.

>
>Why?????


Rosewater and custard have very clashing flavours. Furthermore, rose ice
cream comes from the Middle East, and the type of ice cream being made
there is a condensed-milk base variety which never uses eggs. So there's
both tradition and taste involved.

>> Personally, I also think most fruit ice creams are a little better
>> eggless, as long as you have enough fruit concentration (you don't
>> need the eggs to cut down the fat, and you don't need to stabilise
>> other ingredients).

>
>Personally, I think the only way to make ice cream
>is the cooked custard method - that is, with eggs!
>Why do you say eggs are needed to cut down the fat?
>That makes no sense since without eggs there is much
>less fat. Lots of fat is what make good texture in
>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. It seems to be a product of
marketroid-oriented thinking - that more is better, or at least that more
extreme is better, so that if some fat is good, more must be better, and if
less air is good, very little if any must be better. Hence you get the
Haagen-Dasz block - ice cream you have to chisel out. It only stands to
reason. 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. 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
>mostly make fruit ice creams - my two favorites are
>peach and strawberry, but I also have made many other
>fruit flavors. If anything, fruit ice creams need
>eggs more than others because the fruit adds a lot of
>water and that needs to be offset by a richer base.


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. But with fruit (near 0% fat), you want to
*increase* the fat content, if you want a decent percentage of fruit (I
like around 50% fruit), and so eggs fight this tendency: instead, you need
to use more cream proportionately to milk. This also makes the base richer
as you hint at.

....
>
>> Other ice creams *must* have eggs, especially nut flavours
>> where otherwise it's going to be too oily for any real flavour >
>> intensity.

>
>Again, this seems to be the opposite of common sense.
>Besides, aren't the nuts generally in large pieces and
>not pureed into the ice cream?


If you were only making ice creams that were a generic "base" (usually
vanilla) into which nuts were added in large pieces, then you could get
away with using no eggs. But that's not a nut-flavoured ice cream, that's a
vanilla ice cream with nuts in it. Thus I might refer to it as "vanilla
almond" or "vanilla pistachio". It's typical in the classic nut ice creams
(hazelnut, pistachio, peanut, etc.) to puree them into the ice cream. You
make a nut butter with the nut you're using, then add it to the custard.
That way the flavour is through and through, not just a nut "condiment" to
an otherwise vanilla ice cream.

>> Flavours like vanilla are in the middle. I personally prefer the
>> custard- base vanilla (often called French Vanilla), but I also like
>> the cream-base vanilla (Philadelphia style, IIRC). The one mandatory
>> in either case is that you must use vanilla beans, and hence any good
>> vanilla ice cream *must* have black specks in it.

>
>That's ridiculous. Sure it would be better with real
>vanilla beans but you can make perfectly good vanilla ice
>cream with real vanilla extract.


You might be able to make vanilla ice cream with some vanilla flavour using
extract, but 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. Thus the
only reason not to use vanilla beans at home is if you forgot to buy one on
an occasion when you had planned on making vanilla ice cream. Perhaps also
we have different ideas of "good". My idea of "good" is that it's that
level where the relative difference in quality between the "good" and the
best you could ever do isn't a major, noticeable step.

--
Alex Rast

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