Two Ice Cream Books

[bryant]

I got two books on making ice cream. I’m very pleased with one; I am not so pleased with the other.

Perfect Scoop is really good. David Lebovitz was a pastry chef at Chez Panisse and he cares a lot about good ice cream; his cookbook gives a nice solid grounding in ice cream theory and then rolls into a ton of recipes. There are also sections on granitas, toppings, and things to serve ice cream in. It’s a very foodie cookbook but it’s also very practical — there are not a lot of super-weird ingredients and he’s not snotty about using just the right thing.

His blog has a lot of recipes, not limited to ice cream, but you can get a feel for his techniques and style with this one. Which sounds great, but I do like white chocolate. You may note that his recipes tend towards using less sugar than the average, which is a plus for me. Not that I don’t like sweet ice cream; however, a guide to less sweet ice creams is good.

Finally, it’s a really pretty book. Lots of nice ice cream photography. Ice cream isn’t the most interesting subject in the world (look, another scoop of frozen dairy in a glass bowl!). On the other hand it gives me a good idea of desired textures.

So that’s the good. Bad: Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book. The history of the company is kind of interesting but the recipes, OK. They mostly have eggs, and there is no cooking of the eggs. It’s an entire cookbook full of raw eggs. Grrr. This tells me there’s not much thought given to the recipes, and it also tells me they weren’t that concerned with really giving away how their commercial ice creams are made, because I’m also pretty sure we’d figured out salmonella by 1987. Don’t buy this one, it’s not worth it.

Mirrored from Population: One.

Comments

Raw eggs

[sben.livejournal.com]

If you were actually into the Ben & Jerry’s recipes, you might look for these pasteurized-in-the-shell eggs (http://www.safeeggs.com/) in your area. I saw some in a good grocery store here near Seattle, but haven't tried them myself, and don't know if there are any side-effects of the pasteurization that might (say) change their texture or something.

Re: Raw eggs

[bryant]

Thanks!

[flit.livejournal.com]

David Leibowitz has a recipe for caramelized white chocolate which sounds pretty amazing. He was doing it for a ribbon/swirl in ice cream but I think it would make a good topping, too.

As far as pastuerized eggs go, you can get whole in shell pasteurized eggs at some stores, which can safely be used in raw preparations. They may not be exactly the same texture but they ought to be a lot better than egg replacers; the fat and emulsifiers in the yolk are crucial there and egg replacers are made out of egg whites, not yolk.

Also if you are thinking of trying a raw egg recipe without pasteurized eggs, size and care of the flock makes a big difference on salmonella contamination. Big enclosed flocks have the worst rates of infection (1/4th of them were contaminated in a British study), and small pastured flocks have a significantly lower risk (with small pastured flocks having a 6.5% risk... still significant.) Since the salmonella is carried on the outside of the shell, get in the habit of washing the shells off before cracking them, and treat unsterilized egg shells like raw chicken: they're a cross contamination risk, so touching them and then touching other food can be risky. Also, store eggs on a shelf in the fridge rather than in the door; it keeps them colder which makes the salmonella less likely to develop if it's present.

I've been comfortable eating the occasional raw or lightly cooked egg from my local farmers, but I'm also not immuno-compromised: salmonella for me or Brad is a lot more likely to mean a bad few days than any risk of death. I also eat more risky eggs than Brad does, partially because my immune system is cranked up to the point where infectious disease is just not a big worry for me, partially because he doesn't like runny eggs. I'd be comfortable eating Amish eggs raw, but I would probably not eat them raw if I were pregnant.

[bryant]

I'm not sure what I'd get out of the raw eggs, though. I don't think the Ben and Jerry's recipes were written with raw eggs for taste reasons or anything -- it's just inexplicable. There's nothing wrong with custards. Possibly they didn't think the average 1987 home cook was up to handling a custard, but it's pretty easy to do from my point of view.

[flit.livejournal.com]

Possibly there's a textural difference between raw egg ice creams and custards? But since custard-based ice creams are perfectly tasty and salmonella is very risky now, I don't see why anyone making a recent cookbook wouldn't bow to that necessity.

Also, yeah, custards are tricky but not THAT tricky. It just seems lazy especially as they certainly don't make their own ice cream that way.

The brown sugar banana ice cream sounds delicious, by the way. I've done caramelized sugar on bananas as a dessert (sort of a poor man's bananas foster, just split bananas, sprinkle sugar of any kind over them, and broil until the sugar caramelizes) and adding that to ice cream... yummm. You might get more even caramel results and longer cooking on the bananas if you sprinkle the sugar so it's only on the bananas, though that's fussier to prep. On the other hand it sounded like you got a nice deep caramel with what you did. That recipe must be using the bananas and sugar to keep it from getting too icy.

[flit.livejournal.com]

Oh oh I bet if you added like a tablespoon or two of rum it would be good, too.

[bryant]

I'd imagine the raw eggs would be a bit less thick, but there are better ways to thicken an ice cream that raw eggs.

[kodi]

his cookbook gives a nice solid grounding in ice cream theory and then rolls into a ton of recipes.

I wish these sorts of books were described by a different word than books that merely collect recipes. I didn't consider the latter useful at all before the internet; now they're almost wholly irrelevant.

[bryant]

I like pure recipe collections when they have a strong common identity -- it's nice to pick up a cookbook and know I'm getting something from someone who likes strong flavors and rustic tastes, for example.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Cookbooks—i.e., books that collect recipes—seem to me to be like most other reference books. They're "irrelevant" in the internet age only insofar as the internet has a whole lot of information on it, some of it accurate. If you feel OK about what you're going to find online, you don't need a reference book, but there's no guarantee that what you find online is accurate unless you're looking in a respectable place. Recipes are the same thing: there are a lot of recipes on the internet, but I'd prefer to use recipes from sources whose judgment I trust. In some cases, those are online, but I'm also happy to go to physical paper objects. (Granted, few of my favorite cookbooks are nothing but recipes; they all have varying degrees of discussion and explanation, from Cooking A to Z, which isn't as encyclopedic as I'd like but is pretty darned handy, to books by Alton Brown, who naturally is almost more interested in technique and theory than actual recipes, to Al Sicherman's Caramel Knowledge, which is almost better reading than it is a recipe source.)

[kodi]

They're irrelevant to me, a phrase I should perhaps have thrown into my original comment a few more times, because they're not searchable. Also, being vegetarian, I'm probably being exposed to a lower quality of recipe collection than many people; of the six cookbooks I refer to often, only the Indian cookbook is explicitly vegetarian.

I agree with you about trusting cookbooks, but I don't have the time to vet a recipe collection; the way a cookbook earns my trust is by presenting solid theory. But again, I'm not trying to claim that published recipe collections are useless to anyone but me.