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at Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:38:12 GMT in >,
(Kate Connally) wrote :

>Alex Rast wrote:
>>
>> at Wed, 16 Jun 2004 19:27:23 GMT in >,
>> (Kate Connally) wrote :
>>
>> >Alex Rast wrote:
>> >
....
>> >> Personally, I also think most fruit ice creams are a little better
>> >> eggless, ...
>> >
>> >Personally, I think the only way to make ice cream
>> >is the cooked custard method - that is, with eggs!
.... 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.

This is the source of our divergence. Different tastes and opinions on
texture. If you prefer that particular texture, then my comments wouldn't
by and large apply.

>> It seems to be a product of
>> marketroid-oriented thinking ... 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.
>.... I've known that is *way* before Haagen Dasz existed,
>having been a connoisseur of ice cream my whole life.

Yes, this is a clear difference in personal preference. If you like an ice
cream with a higher fat, there's no reason not to make that type in
preference.

> 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.

I agree that store-bought ice creams before the era of the "Super-
premiums" weren't especially good. And on balance, the super-premium brands
did represent an improvement over what had previously been available. But
for my taste, they still weren't great - because they went towards the too
dense, too hard, too greasy, for my taste. There was one ice cream brand
that had what IMHO was the perfect balance - Cascadian Farm. However, they
seem to have discontinued national distribution (you can still get their
ice cream on the farm stand itself)

>> 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.

But any time you use any heating device to "soften" ice cream (including
setting it out on the counter), you're going to get uneven heating, and
generally some melting. Personally, I prefer no melted ice cream
whatsoever. (Yes, this means using a chilled bowl, and in the case of
eating it out of the container, wrapping paper towel around the container
so that the heat of your hands won't melt the ice cream). I've not
encountered any of the super-premiums, kept in any form of sub-freezing
sotrage, not to be virtually block-solid. My freezer isn't particularly
cold - certainly not at the real deep freeze level some people keep theirs
at.

>> 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.

I was just pointing out that making a broad assertion like "more fat is
better" must clearly have limits, because since at some point more fat must
not be better, since the most fat you could ever have would be 100%. The
hypothetical situation is deliberately ridiculous, to show the limits most
clearly.

>> 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.

Indeed, if you prefer the texture of Haagen Dasz over a good gelato,
there's no reason not to make your ice cream this way. You've got to make
what you like, not what others tell you you should enjoy.

> 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.

This is what I meant with the frozen butter example. Where does that point
of "reason" lie? Why not determine what for you is the optimum percentage,
rather than say "more fat is better" - which doesn't give you very clear
guidelines for perfecting your recipes according to your preferences?

....
>>
>> 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....
....
>
>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???

No, because it's a question of *relative* amounts. An egg doesn't contain
pure fat, it also contains plenty of protein and water. So when you add an
egg to an ice cream, you're going to increase the total amount of
substance. If the percentage of fat in whatever you added the eggs to was
more than the percentage of fat in the eggs, the net effect will be a
reduction in the overall fat percentage of the combined mix. Meanwhile, if
you started with a lower percentage of fat in what you added the eggs to,
then the overall percentage of fat would go up. However, in no case could
the eggs increase the total fat percentage above their own natural
percentage of fat. An egg, btw, has about 9% fat so this would be the fat
percentage limit that you could achieve with eggs.

> 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.

In order to use an eggless base, and actually reduce the fat content, it
would have to be almost entirely milk. However, that doesn't work because
chocolate and nut butters won't emulsify in milk. They *will* emulsify in
custard, however, and this is why you really do have to use eggs. In other
words, the benefits of eggs for fatty flavourings is that they are more
effective at emulsifying the fat for their own fat ratio.

>> >... you can make perfectly good vanilla ice
>> >cream with real vanilla extract.
>>
>>... 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!!!!!

$ 1.59 in the bulk bins at my local co-op. And the beans are super-fresh
and plump. Even if they were up at $5-6, I would consider this a relatively
trivial expense (after all, how much, really, is $5.00?) unless I were
literally making industrial-scale quantities of vanilla ice cream every
day. In that situation, the effect of relative price might be significant
and start to cost in the thousands of dollars or more. But I don't really
look at $5.00 as too much to pay, once I've decided to go the extra mile to
make my own ice cream. Put another way - if I'm not willing to pay, say,
$5.00 for a vanilla bean, I might just as well buy a better premium ice
cream and not bother making it at home at all.

>:-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.

I wasn't implying that extract is lowbrow, or that the reason not to use it
is basically one of having a blue-collar mentality. What I meant is that it
makes little *economic* sense. At the point where the cost of a vanilla
bean looms that large, it's probably more cost-effective to buy a good ice
cream from the store.

--
Alex Rast

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