Russell
Gelato from a Commercial Mix
If super premium ice cream is around 16% butterfat, and homemade ice cream is around 19%, how can gelato, made without cream and eggs, be so smooth and creamy when it’s only 3-8% butterfat? It’s a mystery, for sure. Making gelato at home is tricky.
Search for gelato recipes on the web, and you’ll find anything [...]
Scooper Bowl 2010
I read about the Scooper Bowl last year, when the girls from the Scoopalicious blog talked about it. It’s a yearly event in Boston that’s been going on for 28 years now — you pay a small fee, and then eat as much of the 37 flavors of ice cream, from 9 different companies, as [...]
Soy Milk Ice Cream
I know a couple of people that can’t drink milk, which means they suffer a fate worse than death: not being able to eat ice cream. The solution? Make ice cream from soy milk.
But I discovered that there are two problems with making soy milk ice cream. First, soy milk has almost no fat in [...]
Häagen-Dazs Five
I love the idea behind Häagen-Dazs’s “Five” line of all-natural ice cream. Milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and a fifth ingredient for flavor. And absolutely nothing else. No stabilizers, no corn syrup, no artificial flavors or colors, just homemade ice cream at a grocery store.
They have 7 flavors, but I just had to know what ginger [...]
German Chocolate Cake Ice Cream
When I talk to friends about ice cream, the conversation invariably turns into a brainstorming session about all the various kinds of dessert that could be made into an ice cream. So when my cousin’s son made a special request for German Chocolate Cake ice cream, it sounded like a great challenge. Chocolate ice cream with coconut, pecans, and caramel. How hard could it be?
Stabilizers in Ice Cream Part 2: Strawberry Ice Cream
Icy chunks of frozen strawberries in ice cream are the culinary equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. Blending the fruit helps, but all the water in the juice still makes for an ice cream that tastes more cold and frosty than smooth and creamy. After my previous experiment with stabilizers in vanilla ice cream, I [...]
Making an Ice Cream Butterfat Calculator
How much butterfat is in your homemade ice cream? It’s a difficult question to answer. Recently I sat down with a pencil, a stack of paper, and a big eraser, with a mission to make an online butterfat calculator. I decided to start with a Sweet Cream Base recipe of cream, milk, eggs, and sugar. [...]
Making the Ultimate Chocolate Ice Cream
There’s a particular chocolate ice cream recipe that I’ve nicknamed “Oh My God Chocolate”, because those are usually the first words spoken by any female that tries it. It’s deep, rich, and creamy, and makes my wife’s eyes roll to the back of her head when she eats it. But when I used [...]
Guinness Ice Cream
When I drink beer while eating ice cream, I’m never sure if the strange looks I get from people are because they think it’ll taste disgusting or because they think I’ll get sick — or both. So when I heard about beer ice cream, well, how could anyone say drinking beer with ice cream was [...]
Stabilizers in Ice Cream
Most commercial ice creams contain things like guar gum, locust bean gum, carrageenan, xanthan gum, polysorbate 80, monoglycerides, and diglycerides. What the heck are these scary-sounding things, and why are they in our ice cream?
In the ice cream business, these are all known as “stabilizers”, and they mainly help with two things: reducing iciness, and [...]
