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Kate Connally
 
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Default Ice Cream Question???

Alex Rast wrote:
>
> 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.


If I were making a "traditional" Middle Eastern dish
then I would do it the way that they do. However, there
is no reason not to make a rose flavored custard-based
ice cream on your own. I can't see why the flavors would
clash. However, I don't think I would like rose ice
cream of any sort. I use rose water in various Middle
Eastern and North African dishes that I make but I don't
think I would care for it as the only major flavor in
something. So I guess I'll never know since I'm not going
to go to the trouble of making rose flavored, custard-
based ice cream just to find out. But in my mind I can
imagine the flavors together and it seems to me they
would go together find, assuming you like the rose flavor
in the first place.

> >> 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.


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.

> 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.


I totally disagree. The fat is what gives the mouth feel.
More fat gives a smoother, creamier, more sensuous mouth
feel. It didn't take any marketing people to come up with
that. I've known that is *way* before Haagen Dasz existed,
having been a connoisseur of ice cream my whole life. 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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. 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.

> > 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.


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??? 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.

> >> 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.


Yeah, if you want to mortgage your house to buy a vanilla bean.
Do you know how much those things cost???? Yikes!!!!!

> 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.


:-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. Sheesh!

Kate

--
Kate Connally
“If I were as old as I feel, I’d be dead already.”
Goldfish: “The wholesome snack that smiles back,
Until you bite their heads off.”
What if the hokey pokey really *is* what it's all about?