10lb of dry ice being delivered tomorrow morning - what should I prep?

Ice cream / gelato / sorbet is on the list, of course. What kind of yield should I expect? Should I scale up 1-2 recipes (7qt stand mixer, fwiw) or try to make several?

Anything else come to mind? A quick recipe search turns up carbonated fruit, which sounds fun & easy, though I have a feeling I could achieve a similar effect with just my whipping siphon (whose cartridges are much, much cheaper than the ice company's minimum order!) -- lemme know if that intuition is wrong, of course.

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Richard_59482

Is an advanced concoction like "strawberries & cream cryocicle" or "aerated green apple sorbet" within the realm of possibility? I.e. are such foams stable enough to "bathe" in finely chopped CO2 for several minutes? (I assume it'll take much longer to achieve the temp gradient seen in the LN2 videos)

tshewman

Freeze some berries (raspberries etc) and create the droplets from them and store in regular freezer for later use. Aerated foams will "stiffen" but I have not had the same success as using LN2 (which is a blast :-)..). If you serve a meal, create a tea of aromatics and pour into the dry ice it will release the aromas and compliment the meal.

viktorgilck

the melting point of C02 is the same as the boilingpoint so you cant let is simmer in it and you wont get the same result as whit LN2. It wont conduct the cold fast enought. Maby if you take the jar of aerated appel sorbet and burry it in the dry ice in the freezer You might atleast be able to get the "smoke" to appear.

T__2156

How'd it go?

Richard_59482

I used roughly 3lb to make the mint straciatella ice cream, 2lb for strawberry-angostura sorbet, and the rest to carbonate a bunch of fruit. All came out splendidly. I added some thermal blankets around the Saran-wrapped styrofoam cooler, netting me >48hr before the dry ice was totally gone, though the fizzy effect was lessened after the first day.

Note: that ice cream recipe is written very poorly. If I wasn't already adept at making custards, I would have screwed things up at several points along the way by following the instructions too literally.

One additional note to ice cream veterans using dry ice for the first time: remove the splash shield from your stand mixer. Otherwise, even a single spoonful of dry ice will make the bowl so cloudy you have no chance of gauging progress.

PS best tool for breaking down a block of dry ice = dough scraper + meat pounder, used as a hammer & chisel, then just the meat pounder alone once the chunks are smaller (but not yet small enough to go into the blender). Same 2 tools I use for my el-cheapo sieve system, BTW