Pumpkin ice cream, coffee-cocoa soil.

Michael Laiskonis, pastry chef of Le Bernardin, now has two blogs. I've been reading his first blog for while, and he's great about posting detailed recipes sometimes, along with a lot of pithy observations about cooking and working in the haute cuisine restaurant industry. But now he has a second blog, his Workbook, which is focused only on methods, details, and works in progress. It's absolutely great. I get as many ideas, techniques, and reconfigurable recipes from one week of his blog as I get from an average pastry chef's cookbook. Another key is that he's usually willing to answer questions in the comments, unlike some blogs.

Anyway, one of his latest posts is all about the math behind making ice cream. I make ice cream fairly regularly, and I was sort of aware that I ought to be considering the things the things he writes about, but I didn't know how to do so, or what my target levels of fat content and dry matter ought to be. I sort of just combined some milk and cream with flavorings, egg yolks, various sugars, and hoped for the best. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

Take, for instance, the ice cream pictured here. It's pumpkin ice cream. And it's fine. But it's not great. It's too thick as it melts, making the mouthfeel kinda starchy instead of just creamy. It's still good, and maybe I'm just nitpicking my own work. If I had it in a restaurant as one component of a composed dessert course I probably wouldn't even notice. But I want it to be better. And now I've got a lot better handle on it. Now, the starch content of pumpkin introduces a whole new wrinkle, which is why most of Michael Laiskonis' ice creams use juices and extracts, rather than pureed whole fruit and veg. But now I understand at least a few of the more important variables.

The article is a must-read for anyone who ever makes ice cream, and wants to be able to create his own recipes.

Posted by Barzelay on 2009/01/17 @ 13:29 | Comments (1) |

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