Technical
Humphry Slocombe’s “Secret Breakfast” Ice Cream
Humphry Slocombe is an ice cream shop that’s famous for using ingredients like bacon, chilies, prosciutto, mushrooms, and even foie gras, so of course I had to check it out when I was in San Francisco a while back. Their signature flavor is “Secret Breakfast”, made with bourbon and corn flakes. The name alone is […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 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 extending […]
Transporting Ice Cream With Dry Ice
We flew from Texas up to Rhode Island to visit some friends, and I wanted to take some homemade ice cream with us. Actually our friend had jokingly asked me to bring some, so it got me wondering if it really was feasible. It turns out, it is! Ice cream is great, except for that […]
Ice Cream Machines
So you have a bowl of cream, milk, and sugar, and you want to turn it into ice cream. What are your options? You could just throw it into the freezer for a while, but you’d just get a frozen block of sweet cream — not exactly ice cream. What’s missing? The secret ingredient: air. […]
Commercial Ice Cream Mixes
Ever wondered how small ice cream shops and restaurants make their homemade ice cream? Well, it turns out many of them don’t actually beat together the eggs and sugar, and then heat the milk and cream, and go through the whole process like we do at home. They just pour a pre-made mix into the […]
Butterfat and Ice Cream
Contrary to what you may have heard, fat is good. One of the biggest factors in ice cream’s texture is the amount of “butterfat” (the fatty part of milk) that it contains. If there’s not enough butterfat, the ice cream tends to taste icy and not very smooth—which is fine if you’re making a sherbet […]
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