Ice cream cooking temperatures / times

Paul_Raphaelson_79373

Has anyone experimented with different times / temperatures for cooking (pasteurizing) ice cream?

I'm interested in:

-milk flavor (fresh vs. cooked)

-egg yolk flavor (how prominent)

-final texture of ice cream (denaturing milk proteins to a certain degree increases their emulsifying power)

The first two points are most important. I prefer a fresh milk flavor, and no detectable egg.

I'm thinking a lower temperature, slower cook would be an improvement over 80°C / 30+ minutes.

Thoughts?

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Comments

tshewman

The egg flavor can be considerably diminished by keeping the temperature at 70C due to yolk proteins coagulation at around 72C. When I first read about Heston doing this, I tried it and was quite impressed (actually did a batch of the vanilla cinamon this past weekend). 70C for 10 minutes is now what I typically do and seems to work well. As I understand it, the final texture is a combination of elements, milk, non-fat milk solids and sugar.

Paul_Raphaelson_79373

Thanks Todd. Any sense if egg flavor intensifies progressively above 72? According the custard tables in the MC books, viscosity goes up progressively.

tshewman

Subjectively, I would say yes. I've done it 3 different ways:

1. 70C or below

2. Until it coats the back of the spoon (which ironically leaves small bits of egg in the bottom of the pan when strained).

3. To 85C per Heston (although I'm not sure if 85 is necessary) for a black forest bacon and egfg ice cream.

There is a huge progression of "eggy" flavor from #1-#3 with no egg left in the pan at 70C or below.

No doubt the MC books are accurate and the CS recipe for custards are done at 80C (which is part of the reason I wonder if 85C is necessary). Perhaps with the increased heat more flavor compounds are released.

Paul_Raphaelson_79373

I'm probably going to have to run a bunch of tests. I don't like egg flavor, but my recipes mostly deal with this by using a minimum ... 2 yolks per 1000g or so. I think cooked vs. fresh milk flavors are going to be deciding factor.

Paul_Raphaelson_79373

I've run a bunch of tests on this now, cooking the mix sous-vide at temperatures from 72°C to 80°C, for times ranging from 15 minutes to an hour. In a series of double-blind triangle tests, there was a very slight preference for 75°C at 30 minutes, but the differences were so slight I can't claim they were significant. We tested unflavored ice cream base.

However, this was on ice cream with a very low concentration of yolk—2 yolks per liter. I was testing the effects on the milk, and don't like ice creams with a lot of egg. So it's possible that hydrogen sulfide would have been detectable with 3 or 4 times the yolk concentration.

More information on my ice cream series at the Underbelly blog. http://underbelly-nyc.blogspot.com