Ice Cream
Me and Liv have been toying with the idea of buying an ice cream maker - one of those cheapo battery operated ones that simply churns the cream in the freezer. Well, to put it more accurately, I've been pointing out to Liv that we need an ice cream maker, but she reckons that it will probably be one of those gadgets that we use once which then gathers dust in the cupboard. That's not the point. The point is that we need an ice cream maker, and frankly I don't understand how we've lived so long without one.What is the point of an ice cream maker? Well, using conventional household cooling techiques (i.e. sticking something in the freezer) the mix will freeze quite slowly, and as it does so, ice crystals will form, which doesn't make for a smooth creamy result. In order to combat this you either need to churn it so that the ice crystals get broken up (which is what an ice cream maker does), or you need to freeze your mix really quickly. Heston Blumenthal's book In Search of Perfection recommends that you use dry ice to rapidly freeze your mix, but frankly that stuff isn't that easy to come by, and while it will look cool it's bit of a faff and an expensive way to make ice cream.
Harold McGee, one of the godfathers of mollecular cooking and author of one of the most influential modern texts on cooking: On Food & Cooking (a book I'm currently ploughing through, hence that exciting post on milk a few weeks back), has reported in his NYT column on a method of rapidly cooling your ice cream using items you will probably already have in your kitchen: a bowl, salt, water and a freezer bag. Basically, salt reduces the freezing temperature of water from zero degress celsius to -12 degrees celsius. Therefore an ice bath with salt will have a greater cooling power than ice made simply with water, and would for example cool a bottle of water in half the time it would take in a standard ice bath.
This technique can therefore be used to rapildy freeze an ice cream mix, and he provides a recipe here. I've not tried it yet, but will when I get a chance. If it works, it will have saved us £35 on a gadget that will rarely get used.
1 Comments:
Hi Chris,
The salt water method does work, I tried it, but only once. I saw it on a tv programme about how Victorians cooked. It made brilliant ice cream, but you still have to churn the mixture, which I ended up doing by hand. I can't remember how long it took, I do remember that I gave up before it was fully frozen (because my arm felt ready to drop off) and put the mix in the freezer.
I've bought an ice-cream maker. It's brilliant.
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