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

[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.