So I made the Vanilla Bean Ice Cream found here the other day:
I have to say, I was not really blown away. I've made a lot of custard based ice cream at home on a stovetop (probably in the neighborhood of 50 batches) and so I was excited to try this sous vide, but came away a bit disappointed. First, I think the temp specified (185F) is too high. Every stovetop recipe I've done says not to push it past 180F. The custard came out of the water bath fully broken after one hour. I agitated at 20 minutes and 40 minutes and it looked fine, but at 1 hour, it was curdled and broken. I did manage to blend it smooth, but still, there's no reason for it to break in the first place. The temp is just too high in my opinion. Second, and this ties into the heat issue, it tasted like it was overcooked. Gone was any hint of fresh cream. I think the other cause of this may be the very generous use of egg yolks. For roughly 1L of base, we're talking about roughly 12 egg yolks here. For that volume I've never done more than 8, which has always been plenty. Another trick I learned doing stovetop custard base is to reserve 1/2 of the cream from the pot. Once the custard is cooked, pull it off the heat, cool it down, and then mix in the remaining cream. This brings back a lot of that fresh cream taste back into a custard base. Lastly, I think it's SLIGHTLY under sweetened. Just personal taste, but I tend to like desserts that are not super high on the sugar scale, but even for me this was a little lacking in sugar. So, this weekend I'll work on V2, where I will:
1: Cook at 180F for one hour
2. Decrease the egg yolks by 25-30%.
3. Reserve half the cream to mix in after cooking.
4. Raise the sugar content by around 20%.
-Sky
