How about a bourbon caramel sauce for the peach (and maybe the chocolate)?
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Ok, black raspberry and chocolate sorbet #2 are churned. The raspberry concerned me for a while; it is VERY warm even in the A/C here, and it didn’t move from liquid to not-liquid as quickly as I’m used to. It eventually did churn up, but without the explosive airy overflow that I got the last few times I made it.
I saved the original for last: the copycat Jeni’s brambleberry crisp.
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Do you have enough scoops and shovels?
Yes! And I got festive disposable bowls/cups/napkins, too. I’m excited!
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We want photos of the set up and aftermath!
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The final flavor is in the freezer. I took a spin through the grocery store tonight for cones and topping ideas, and came home with some goodies.
Tomorrow: farmers market, flowers, some baking, fetching folding chairs, and setup.
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You are really getting into this! Can’t wait for the report.
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First ice cream social in the books! Holy cow have I eaten a LOT of ice cream in the past two weeks!!!
Eleven guests, all friends of my mother, plus me. The event was at 6:30, with everyone instructed to eat their supper beforehand, as we had decided not to serve savory food.
We also had to move the party indoors due to the very hot weather, which made logistics a bit more difficult (this is a house built in 1950, it’s not the kind of ‘open concept’ situation that allows literal herds of people to move around en masse.) NO MATTER, we made it work.
I bought ice and put it in big plastic containers; each container could hold two flavors of ice cream. I taped the flavor names to the wall behind each container. Everyone served themself.
The local fruit right now includes very good watermelon and peaches, so I made a rainbow watermelon “starter,” and baked a peach-frangipane galette to go along with the ice cream and toppings.
Ice cream flavors:
Strawberry
Chocolate sorbet
Black raspberry
Blueberry
Brambleberry crisp
Peach frozen yogurt
Toppings:
Chopped pecans
Chopped walnuts
Reese’s Pieces
Chopped Heath bar
Chopped York Peppermint Patties
Miniature Ghirardelli chocolate chips
Magic shell (nobody used it 
)
And a big bag of local thin pretzels, a favorite accompaniment to ice cream in these parts.
I provided wafer and sugar cones as well as waffle bowls (first time eating these - surprisingly delicious) but nobody used a cone, opting to serve their scoops into plastic bowls.
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WOW
Really spectacular, no one will ever forget this labor of love from you!
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Incredible! A party for the ages!
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Hurrah! All that planning and tweaking really shows! Congratulations, now will you hire out to small parties?
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Oh, if money were no object, I’d do this full time in a heartbeat.
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So fun! Nice assortment.
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Reading the egullet boards (they have a long thread on homemade ice cream and there’s someone in there who says RLB’s chocolate ice cream is phenomenal btw) led me to Paul Raphael’s blog on ice cream. He has a very scientific approach and I’ve been reading up and now have done a deep dive into ice cream science and am really excited to play around with flavors applying a lot of the principles outlined. I tried out his rum raisin and the texture truly is amazing, and yes, the kind of sweetness I would prefer. I’d like it more boozy, but that might have to do with Dominican rums being under 40% alcohol.
Cooking a base sous vide is not something I’m necessarily going to keep doing because it’s fiddly (I used a jar rather than a bag) and frankly unrealistic for someone who lives in a country where power outages are a regular part of life, but it definitely has some advantages, too.
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Seems he’s cooking it only to pasteurize?
I love the flavor of rum raisin, though I don’t like raisins 
So I guess… rum!
Well the cooking is to pasteurize and to hydrate stabilizers like locust bean gum, but the sous vide part is also because a lot of people feel that going above certain temperatures produces eggier flavor and more cooked milk flavor, so with sous vide you can prevent that by not going above a set temperature. And long cook times have positive results on ice cream because of denaturation of milk proteins, though very long leads to more cooked milk flavor. Sous vide is a way to do that long cook with more precision in a home setting.
Underbelly mentions lack of evaporation being a reason they favor sous vide.
“I’ve been investigating some of long cooking theories w/r/t protein denaturing and emulsification. Most of what’s in the literature doesn’t concern ice cream … it acknowledges that sugar content can push temperatures up considerably, so there are a lot of question marks. Jenni Britton may know the most about this. She details her process on her site. Basically, she separates milk into skim and heavy cream, and then concentrates the skim portion with microfiltration, using no heat. She pasteurizes at 79°C for 2 hours (!) before homogenizing. her goal is like Ruben’s … to use the milk proteins as a stabilizer and emulsifier blend. This is related to what brands like Haagen Dazs do also, although they don’t talk about their process.”
From Ruben Porto’s Ice Cream Science page:
“ 4.2. IMPROVE FOAMING AND EMULSIFICATION
The second reason we’ll be heating our mix to 72°C (162°F) and holding it there for at least 25 minutes is to improve whey protein foaming and emulsification. Foam formation and its stability is important for texture and for the retention of air that is incorporated into ice cream during dynamic freezing. Heating milk so that the whey proteins undergo partial protein unfolding yields a more voluminous and more stable foam and improves the emulsifying characteristics of the proteins (Philips et al., 1990). Similarly, Damodaran (1996) found that denatured proteins have better foaming properties, attributed to increased hydrophobicity, and greater interfacial contact. Sava et al (2005) found that surface hydrophobicity increased considerably at temperatures between 70°C and 77.5°C ( 158°F and 171.5°F) when whey protein was heated for 45 minutes, with greater increases noted after longer heating times.
4.3. IMPROVE BODY AND TEXTURE
The third reason we’ll be heating our mix to 72°C (162°F) and holding it there for 25 minutes is that heating milk also improves ice cream texture because of the denaturation of proteins and the consequent increase in their water-holding capacity (Goff & Hartel 20)
Dana Cree’s key lime pie frozen yogurt.
We bought a bunch of limes recently and I had yogurt with no destination, so I thought this would be good since it seems to be a favorite among people who own the book.
This features raw egg yolks like classic key lime pie because Cree said it just didn’t taste right without them. The source of sugar is only the condensed milk and this gets 150 g of lime juice, so it’s very tangy. My yogurt is 10% fat, which is great for a luxurious texture, but I suspect even with lower fat yogurt this wouldn’t be an issue due to the condensed milk and the yolks. I added salt and opted to strain out the zest due to finding in past instances that people prefer no zest in their ice cream.
Cree gives the option of either guar gum or xanthan as stabilizers, presumably since they can be fully hydrated without any heat. I opted for xanthan, since guar gum’s main benefit is adding body and I didn’t think this would lack for body, but I went for a 3:1 ratio of gelatin to xanthan with 1 gram of gelatin and .33 of xanthan. The gelatin can be dissolved separately, so it poses no issue with the mix not being heated.
This is a delicious flavor, but the type of thing that is not universally loved as people here aren’t fond of tart things. It’s super smooth and creamy, yet refreshing, but for some “bracing” might be a more accurate descriptor.
A swirl of Graham cracker crust would be welcome and how I would make it if I were to make it again.
I am looking forward to trying a sherbet flavor from this book, which are cited as a highlight.
I made the bubblegum flavor as my first ice cream out of curiosity, and while it does taste like bubblegum, it’s not a flavor that I’d crave. It likely works much better in the flavor she suggests where it’s swirled with strawberry sauce and homemade marshmallows. I also thought using lemon zest and orange zest was pointless and better done with a drop or two of lemon and orange oils.
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I made the base for this, my all-time favorite homemade ice cream, before apricots disappeared from the farmers market, and froze it. Finally made space in the freezer for the ice cream maker bowl and churned it up. I haven’t made any ice cream for two or three years, after making this one annually for five or so years, and if is as fantastic as always, with its deep apricot and toasty almond flavor and lush, dense texture. It keeps very well, too, without degradation of its texture.
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As I’ve mentioned, I’m not big on (dark) chocolate ice cream. Even as a kid it was never a favorite.
However, I have on a few occasions encountered chocolate ice creams that I very much enjoyed and actually craved. One thing they had in common is they were very clearly well-salted. They were just regular chocolate ice creams with no extra qualifiers about being salted added. Chocolate ice cream tastes very dull to me if there isn’t sufficient salt.
I posted about ordering cocoa recently and getting the wrong cocoa (btw it’s been 5 days since I emailed them about it and I have received no response, so customer support leaves a lot to be desired). I had been curious about Alice Medrich’s chocolate sorbet for a while, so I decided to try that with my new cocoa. I know the DL chocolate sorbet is more popular, but I only have cocoa, so Alice’s recipe was going to be the one.
I opted in the end to add some milk as she suggested for those who might want a less intense flavor. So I made sherbet. Right off the bat I added 1/4 tsp salt instead of “two big pinches” of salt. When I tasted, it wasn’t enough, so I kept adding salt until the base tasted like something I’d want to eat and ended up with a healthy 1/2 tsp. I did not measure the rum either, but just threw in a couple of glugs until it tasted right — the rum is in there but the base didn’t taste boozy either.
One more change I made was to add 1/4 tsp 210s as I figured the gum arabic in particular would do well in a sorbet, where the struggle is not having much in the way of solids, and the xanthan couldn’t hurt either. I also used a full cup of sugar at 200 g.
The sherbet is delicious with a great texture. It’s very smooth and froze harder than an ice cream, but still pretty scoopable.
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Starting my first batch of the year of David L’s lemon verbena ice cream with my homegrown verbena.
I’ve doubled the amount of herb he calls for, as usual, and will also let it steep longer than he specifies.
I’m considering adding a swirl of the homemade berry swirl I typically use in the brambleberry crisp ice cream. I really like that combo of flavors.
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