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Technique question regarding ice cream

johG_241326

Hi everyone.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and after seeing this Instagram post, I'm more confused on how chefs are keeping ice cream/sorbet cold enough to hold a quenelle for more than a couple of minutes.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BNt46PLBanC/ if you watch this, and notice that it's for 300 guests. Would the chef(s) plate up like two and two (or three and three), and then serve - or what? I've seen like 20 plates of dessert with quenelles of sorbet/ice cream ready to serve, where all the quenelle seems to be intact (not melted a bit). The plates isn't kept in a freezer, as this would destroy some of the other components on the plates. When I'm quenelling sorbet or ice cream at home, it's starting to melt like half a minute after plating it.

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Comments

wolfiegirl

The Instagram post was very interesting! Cool presentation!

I thought at first that perhaps the ice cream/sorbet was made using a stabilizer like trimoline. But I'm not sure that would help keep it from melting as much as it would keeping it smooth. My next thought is that the quinnells were made in advance and kept on a sheet pan in the freezer until it was time to plate up. I'm also gonna put my money on that the plates were cold either from the fridge or freezer.

Chris_Young_80640

So, nothing that complex. The most important thing is that the roche (it's a one-handed quenelle) isn't actually sitting on the plate, it's sitting on some granola. That insulates it from the ceramic, and helps keep it from melting quickly. The other factor is that having a high-fat, churned ice cream makes for ice cream that melts much slower. The leaner the ice cream, and the less air whipped into it, the faster it will melt.

The ice cream itself isn't that cold, or you wouldn't be able to easily scoop a roche with one hand. In general, the ice cream is probably around -5 °C, which was the temperature we always churned our ice creams to at The Fat Duck (churning to a consistent temperature is the best way to get consistency).

On a typical night, I used to have maybe 8 to 12 plates on my bench, with roches of ice cream sitting on them while I plated the rest of the dish. The kitchen wasn't cold where I worked, and the plates were room temperature. It worked because we always plated the ice cream on something that insulated it from the plate and kept it from sliding around while it was carried to the guest's table.