BaitCon ice cream notes
Jun. 29th, 2012 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chhotiiFirst off, making two flavors of ice cream for BaitCon, plus supporting Sophia in making a non-trivial flavor of her own, was... over-enthusiastic. Too much effort and stress. Next time I go to BaitCon, I will choose just one thing to focus all my efforts on, and try to do that well. It's not like they lack in multitudes of ice cream flavors.
Pumpkin: I made this recipe, basically. I used half-and-half instead of heavy cream, and being pressed for time, I cooked the cream really, really briefly. The problem, I think, is that the ratio of water to butterfat etc. was too high; the final product was really hard and icy. Flavor was wonderful, the texture not so great. Maybe I should have used heavy whipping cream because of its lower water to butterfat ratio? Or might cooking the cream longer have driven off a useful amount of water? I did drain the pumpkin, but not finding cheesecloth at Market Basket, I bought a reusable coffee filter and used that in place of the cheesecloth. About 2 or 3 tablespoons of liquid drained from the pumpkin through the reusable coffee filter. Maybe it would have drained much more dramatically through cheesecloth, although I would find that surprising. *stumped*
If having too much water in relation to butterfat makes the texture too icy and hard, what keeps the vegan recipes from sucking? (I assume they don't suck, but honestly, I haven't ever made it to the green table. Do they suck?)
Grape: I should start with grape juice concentrate, not full-strength. First pass at trying to boil down the juice resulted in a product that was a bit too subtle. Boiled it down again, this time on an impressive industrial-strength burner on the Abode kitchen, down to about 50% volume, much better. (Had not appreciated just how wimpy my home stove burner is compared to the Abode kitchen, and therefore how much longer I would have needed to spend at the stove.) Unfortunately, I had not taken note of exactly how much sugar I used last year, so this year I totally had to guess; fortunately, there seems to be a wide range of acceptable amounts of sugar. Most of the grape juice concentrate + sugar + half-and-half went into Sophia's kid's tasting ice cream (grape plus blueberries and mango chunks), which JB seemed to really like. This left very little grape ice cream for the adult tasting. Perhaps because of the small volume of the batch, it largely melted before people could get to it. My grape ice cream, when melted, still has a terrific flavor, but it looks just dreadful, and thus I don't think it was well received.
If I go to BaitCon next year, should I focus on perfecting grape, or pumpkin? Or something else?
Pumpkin: I made this recipe, basically. I used half-and-half instead of heavy cream, and being pressed for time, I cooked the cream really, really briefly. The problem, I think, is that the ratio of water to butterfat etc. was too high; the final product was really hard and icy. Flavor was wonderful, the texture not so great. Maybe I should have used heavy whipping cream because of its lower water to butterfat ratio? Or might cooking the cream longer have driven off a useful amount of water? I did drain the pumpkin, but not finding cheesecloth at Market Basket, I bought a reusable coffee filter and used that in place of the cheesecloth. About 2 or 3 tablespoons of liquid drained from the pumpkin through the reusable coffee filter. Maybe it would have drained much more dramatically through cheesecloth, although I would find that surprising. *stumped*
If having too much water in relation to butterfat makes the texture too icy and hard, what keeps the vegan recipes from sucking? (I assume they don't suck, but honestly, I haven't ever made it to the green table. Do they suck?)
Grape: I should start with grape juice concentrate, not full-strength. First pass at trying to boil down the juice resulted in a product that was a bit too subtle. Boiled it down again, this time on an impressive industrial-strength burner on the Abode kitchen, down to about 50% volume, much better. (Had not appreciated just how wimpy my home stove burner is compared to the Abode kitchen, and therefore how much longer I would have needed to spend at the stove.) Unfortunately, I had not taken note of exactly how much sugar I used last year, so this year I totally had to guess; fortunately, there seems to be a wide range of acceptable amounts of sugar. Most of the grape juice concentrate + sugar + half-and-half went into Sophia's kid's tasting ice cream (grape plus blueberries and mango chunks), which JB seemed to really like. This left very little grape ice cream for the adult tasting. Perhaps because of the small volume of the batch, it largely melted before people could get to it. My grape ice cream, when melted, still has a terrific flavor, but it looks just dreadful, and thus I don't think it was well received.
If I go to BaitCon next year, should I focus on perfecting grape, or pumpkin? Or something else?
