Those of you who’ve made pastry cream before will likely recognize this process, for indeed the steps are almost identical — especially since I’m making vanilla bean instead of peach (what can I say, I waited too long and they rotted…oh well!). Start by splitting your vanilla bean in twain like so: Scrape out the […]
READ ONJust asking, because to me it looked an awful lot like a crème anglaise recipe I recently made. Except instead of cream, the recipe called for milk. Funny that, because if it wasn’t for the extra fat I’d swear they were exactly the same thing.
READ ONCan anyone tell me which ingredient in the below recipes qualifies as a “stabilizer”? It is of course the flour, which as the mix cooks will “gelatinize”, i.e. let loose its starch molecules, which will go on to inhibit ice crystal formation. What stops the ice cream from tasting “floury” you might wonder. For one […]
READ ONThis recipe was supplied by a friend and reader, and it’s one I can personally vouch for (having eaten it at a cookout not long ago). What I like about the written instructions is that they provide a window into how ice cream was made for much of the last century. Indeed, these proportions are […]
READ ONSo if ice cream is a foam, just how much air is there in the stuff? That all depends. It can be as little as 15% or as much as 50% depending on the brand. Who first thought to incorporate air bubbles into ice cream? Why, the very same people who’ve been obsessed with foams […]
READ ONWhat the Chicago Fire did for the reputation of Irish livestock owners, the Great Fire of London did for bakers. Supposedly — supposedly — started in the bakeshop of one Thomas Farynor (on of all streets: Pudding Lane), The Great Fire destroyed some 80% of the city over three days, killing 16 people. On the […]
READ ONHaving been around the block with the composition of ice cream over the last week, it’s worth asking at this point what type of substance ice cream actually is. Every so often I come across a summer newspaper article on ice cream where the author pronounces sagely that ice cream is classified by science as […]
READ ONOne of the great early ice cream lovers, at least according to legend, was the Roman emperor Nero. He was said to have sent fleet-footed slaves high into the Apennines to fetch quantities of snow, which his cooks would combine with honey and other flavorings for the enjoyment of all his guests. Obviously this wasn’t […]
READ ONAs passionate as so many women are about ice cream, it’s no surprise they didn’t sit around waiting for some man to invent the home ice cream maker. In fact it was Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia who took matters into her own hands in 1846, inventing the classic hand-crank ice cream machine. Up until that […]
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