So now we know what an emulsion is: a dispersion of tiny drops of oil in water (it can also be the reverse, but why complicate things?). That dispersion won’t be stable unless we get a little chemical help to prevent all those little oil drops from coalescing together. That’s what emulsifiers are. They’re like […]
READ ONForgive me for getting a little off-track with my food additives week, but whenever my white whale Michael Pollan surfaces, the Captain Ahab in me comes out. He breaches! Drop the sails! Lower the boats! Now that that’s over, let’s talk about emulsifiers, shall we? But before we can do that, we need to back […]
READ ONReader Al asks: Can you use too much stabilizer in an ice cream/sorbet? And what happens if you do? Indeed you can use too much, at great cost to your finished product. Using too much of a stabilizer like gelatin creates a mouthfeel that’s gummy, almost chewy in extreme cases. So, it’s better to err […]
READ ONThat’s the gist of most of the comments I’ve received about my post on Michael Pollan. And it’s entirely fair. What I tend not to write in my Michael Pollan posts is that I’d like to see many of the very things he talks about. I’d like to see people healthier and happier, a lot […]
READ ONFunny how things work out sometimes. Here I am talking about food additives this week, and who should show up in town? My old friend Michael Pollan. I don’t know how I missed all the promotion surrounding his lecture last night, but I did. Once I finally realized he’d be speaking a mere six blocks […]
READ ONMost of you have probably figured this is out already. Primarily, stabilizers interfere with ice crystal formation, helping to keep the crystals small and — hopefully — undetectable to the tongue. The upshot is the sorbet has a smoother texture. However stabilizers also offer another benefit. You’ll recall from an earlier post that stabilizers reduce […]
READ ONNeat as sorbet syrup is in terms of its ability to resist freezing completely, it would still freeze into a (mostly) solid block were it not for the ice cream machine. An ice cream machine performs two crucial roles in the sorbet-making process. Firstly, it freezes the syrup mixture quickly, and that helps create ice […]
READ ONBefore we can talk about what a stabilizer does in a sorbet, it’s important to know how a sorbet works. Most people’s reaction, on seeing a sorbet recipe, is: wow, that’s a lot of water. The concern being: won’t all that water tun into big chunks of ice? The answer to that is no. The […]
READ ONLots of folks like to disparage stabilizers, but they’re one of the most important classes of food additives. As their name implies, their main job is to prevent things from happening. If a catalysts are instigators of reactions, stabilizers can be thought of as their opposite. Sort of like chemical cops, they keep molecules of […]
READ ONReader Lee comments: I like chemicals too, and in fact have ever since the ’60s. But this Cremodan stuff: I looked on the Internets, and it’s pretty expensive: $25 for a pound! That’s a lot of tomato sorbet! Any idea of where I can get it in smaller quantities? Also, suppose I want to kill […]
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