Ice Cream Series: Part 2
Almost all ice cream ingredients can be divided into following categories:
Milk and Cream
For reasons that will be apparent later in the series, I suggest milk and cream that are pasteurized at lower temperatures. This means not Ultra-Pasteuraized, and not UHT shelf milk—which can be fine products, but they have disadvantages in ice cream. You can identify a low-temperature pasteurized product by its short shelf life: the sell-by date will be closest to the production date. The label may even brag about it.
Do stick with homogenized milk and cream, unless you happen to have a homogenizer.
A couple of broad points to consider:
1. Our top concern with milk and cream are the water and the fat.
This lower-fat version allows for more vibrant flavors and a cleaner finish. It’s popular with pastry chefs who make fruit flavors, or who use ice cream as part of plated desserts for after a heavy meal.
1 part cream, 4 parts milk: 7-8% milk fat
This much lower fat version, in the style of northern Italian gelato, can’t legally be called ice cream, but offers the most vibrant flavors and cleanest finish. It usually depends on low overrun (very little air whipped into it) for a sense of creaminess and richness.
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Invert Syrup. You want it. |
Sweeteners and Other Solids
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The locust or carob bean. King of ice cream stabilizers. |
Stabilizers and Emulsifiers
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The best vanilla pods cost more per gram than every ingredient besides saffron |
Flavors
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Yes please. |
Hi Anon,
I haven't experimented with whey. This might make sense if you were getting extremely technical with using denatured whey proteins as emulsifiers or stabilizers, and found some reason to change the ratio of whey to casein. But you'd need to be privy to research that I haven't been able to find. I'm happy to just use nonfat dry milk, and to get the benefits of all the milk solids.
People have asked me about using whey so they can eat ice cream like a protein shake. This is not my jam. If I want a protein shake, I have a protein shake. Ice cream is about deliciousness.
Have you tried incorporating whey protein powder into the mix? What do you think the effects would be?
Yup! That's the answer.
Oh I get it now! It is not the percentage of milkfat in the total milk/cream quantity.
Rather, it is the percentage of milkfat in the total weight of the final product!
So I guess the values above are empirical.
Nice, thanks!
Hello. I just started reading this wonderful blog.
However I have one question.
In the calculation of the percentage of fat, you write that, for example:
1 part cream and 1 part milk give about 15-16% milk fat.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but, if cream is 36% milkfat and milk is 3.6% milkfat, then the final result of these parts should be 19.8% milkfat.
(assume that 1 part = 100 grams, so -> 1 part of cream has 36 grams of milkfat and 1 part of milk has 3.6 grams of milkfat -> end product milkfat is the sum of the two = 39.6 grams in 200 grams -> 39.6 grams / 2, in order to turn it to percentage.
I found that my calculations are systematically different than your calculations. Do I make a mistake somewhere?
Please let me know if I am wrong.
Thank you very much!
The observation that you have shared is very good about the component of ice-cream and I’ve learnt many new things about the ice-cream and it is not simple to find a such accurate summarize and you have posted this blog for the good work.
Yes, feral binging is a solution to many problems! It's still a challenge to get the texture quite as smooth as possible if you don't have a blast freezer and some kind of homogenizer … but if the flavor blows your mind you might not care too much.
It's an interesting observation that while home ice cream makers have the disadvantage in executing texture, we do have the advantage in maximizing flavor.
And we can negate the texture-stability issue by snarfing down the batch immediately! 😉
Great and informative post. It's not easy to find such a concise summary of a complex subject.