More Creaming the Ice

[kerravonsen]

More ice-cream making tonight!
I also went to a supermarket liquor store at lunchtime to get some brandy, not for drinking, but to use as the heat/cold conductor between the fixed bowl and the removable bowl.

Experiment #3: using the Optifast coffee milkshake mix; also brandy for the conduction
Recipe: used 3 serves and 600ml of water, nothing else extra
Result: success! Creamy, cold, mildly coffee tasting, just a touch of sweetness. Froze 2/3 of it in two separate containers, ate the remaining 1/3 of it.
Lessons: (a) brandy works better than salt+water as a cold-conductor; (b) 600ml is a better quantity than 400ml - it doesn't freeze to the sides so much (c) it's nice to eat the ice-cream out of the bowl, so long as I remember to use a plastic spoon (they don't want metal damaging the surface of the bowl)

Experiment #4: trying for peppermint sorbet, made from peppermint tea
Recipe: 500ml peppermint tea, 4 tsp sweetener
Result: semi-fail; I ended up with granita rather than sorbet. It doesn't taste bad, but it wasn't what I was aiming for.
Lesson: a purely water-based mixture doesn't work; one needs to have something that binds it together somehow.
One option would be pureed fruit (a certain number of recipes use that), but I want to see if I can make something without fruit, since fruit isn't low-calorie enough (I'm only allowed two pieces of fruit a day). Maybe a weak gelatine mixture might work.

Comments

[mistraltoes.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Unless you're in a high-risk group (very young, elderly, or health-compromised) I don't think there's much reason to worry. The Japanese eat raw eggs all the time, and think we're very odd for worrying about getting salmonella from them. And, as reapermum says, dried egg white is safe. Here it's sold as meringue powder, I believe.