The Ice Cream: The Phantom Taster

[kerravonsen]

Here be the weekend, and here be more ice cream!

Regarding Experiment #51, it was rather interesting eating the second half of it (the bit that was put in the freezer overnight) - it was still very gummy. I finally told myself that it was like a frozen strawberry marshmallow; from that point of view, it was yummy.


Experiment #52: Low-Fat Strawberry Ice Cream
Recipe:
* 1 punnet (250g) fresh strawberries
* 8 T Xylitol
* 1/2 t vanilla bean powder
* 100 ml skim milk powder

Chop the strawberries. Microwave on high for 2 minutes.
Add Xylitol. Puree.
Mix in the other ingredients.
Put in the refrigerator to cool.
Process in ice-cream machine.

Whys: I wanted to try the stewing idea again, but with fewer and simpler ingredients.
I added the Xylitol to the strawberries before pureeing them because Xylitol cools things down when it dissolves, so I thought it might cool down the strawberries a teeny bit faster.

Result: Creamy soft-serve texture (but it didn't stick to the sides this time, which is good). The volume was low because I hadn't added any water to the mixture. The taste was mildly strawberry with an odd sort of aftertaste; perhaps it was the Xylitol?

Verdict: Nice texture, not so good in taste.

Lessons: (a) Cooking the strawberries is still a good idea. (b) Try a mix of Xylitol, Erythritol and Splenda next time. (c) More strawberries, less milk.

Comments

Re: Stevia in icecream making is what makes it hard

[kerravonsen]

I've read that Stevia will make the ice cream hard as a rock and so need to add it at the end when the ice cream is nearly done.

I don't think Stevia makes things worse, it's just that it doesn't contribute to making the ice-cream softer. I suspect that the people who warned against Stevia were expecting that Stevia ought to behave like sugar and were burned by that, because they didn't know that sugar contributes more to ice-cream making than just sweetness.

The two main things that contribute to making ice-cream more "scoopable" (that is, not so rock-hard after you've had it in the freezer for a while) are fat and gums (gums are things like gelatine, Xanthan Gum, Guar Gum etc). Sugar contributes too, because it helps make it softer, but fat and gums help preserve the fluffiness. Obviously with low-fat icecream one wishes to avoid the fat, but one doesn't want to put too much gum in, because it can make the ice-cream rather rubbery in texture if there is too much. Also, I think dairy solids contribute a bit too, because I've noticed that my low-fat ice-creams tend to be creamier than my sorbets.

Have any of you done this since this thread was started?

I haven't been making any ice-cream recently, because it's winter here, but take a look at the other posts with the tag food:ice cream experiments, which I posted since this thread was started.

It sounds like, from this thread, that you may be able to cut down on the amount of these two in comparison to table sugar.

Correct; in comparison to table sugar, one doesn't need as much Xylitol or Erythritol to get the same effect on the freezing temperature. But I'm afraid I haven't done a recipe-for-recipe comparison. It's probably easier to compare sorbet with sorbet, because normal ice-cream gets its temperature-alteration from both sugar and fat, while sorbet has no fat, and thus gets its temperature-alteration purely from sugar.

Okay, here's this BBC mango sorbet recipe and my mango sorbet recipe. Note that my recipe uses 8 tablespoons of sugar-alcohols, and the BBC recipe uses 250g of sugar. According to this conversion chart, that's 115g versus 250g: a bit less than half. That meant that I didn't need to add lemon juice to cut the sweetness.