Dry ice ice cream

I held out for ages, but Kat has a ‘desserts’ school cookery project, so we gave in, and had a crack at making ice-cream with dry ice today. We almost didn’t start, as the delivery driver couldn’t find our gate (it’s right there on the front of the house, next to the house number on the gate post; not really a hard ask).  And, we didn’t hear the call, so only mid-morning did we find an email saying that the delivery couldn’t be made.  The driver said he’d come back on Monday – not all that useful as the dry ice would have evaporated, and we would have just bought the most expensive empty polystyrene box ever.  But, we managed to cajole a return, so just after lunch we set off.

Of course, having gone to the expense of the dry ice (almost £50 including £20 for Saturday delivery), we kept making more until we ran out.  Caramel was super, and Tia Maria (Kat’s invention) was just outstanding – we thought it was the best we could remember ever having.  Bacon and egg ice-cream was as odd a taste as when we had it at the Fat Duck restaurant – great, but odd.  Only what we thought would be a dead cert, of chocolate, was a bit meah – fine, but nothing special.

Of course, there were some errors along the way, most clear of which was to break the dry-ice into near powder, and add gently. Our first go had a rather larger load of dry ice, which ‘boiled over’ :-

Quite fun to look at, but it took quite a lot of cleaning up of sticky everything afterwards, and some effort to recover the icecream which was in iron hard lumps.  We abandoned using the baby ice-cream maker that we had been using for churning and used a large bowl, a wooden spoon and elbow grease.  A decent bowl mixer would have been easier, if of course we had one.  We also blitzed the ice cream in a blender when frozen, which made it really smooth.

We also had a go at using it in drinks.  The first stab was a little too enthusiastic to risk putting near your mouth

But, we managed to crack it so Sa could have a witch’s sherry

All in all, great fun.  And with great results, even if it is by far the most expensive ice-cream we’ve ever had!

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Playing with custard

Summary – recipe for set custard

Ingredients (for ~400g = enough for 4 people)

150g semi-skimmed milk
200g double cream
100g egg yolks (6 medium eggs)
1 tsp vanilla essence
30g caster sugar
3 g (1.5 leaves) leaf gelatin

Method

Put all the ingredients apart from the gelatin in the Thermomix, at 80 degrees Centigrade, speed 2, for 7 minutes (or use a saucepan and care not to heat it too hot).

5 minutes from the end, put the Gelatine sheets in cold water

Once finished, stir the gelatine sheets into the custard, put into container you want it to set in, and cool over ice before refrigerating.

Notes

A couple of weeks ago we made a custard with our Thermomix (our new highly indulgent kitchen toy).  Pretty much everything else we have done has been fab, and this wasn’t – the flavour wasn’t great, and the set wasn’t good either.  And, many recipes for custard have loads more sugar in than tastes good at the end (to us), so I decided to suss out a decent custard recipe, both for pouring and set.  This post is for me, to make notes as I go

Trial one

Based on Thermomix cookbook recipe, p 189.  50% recipe, asked for 3 large egg yolks; I used 4 smaller ones.  Note that the temperature is 80 degrees rather than the 90 degrees used for the original recipe that I didn’t like – less likely to over-cook the egg.

Tasted lovely when just done.  Trial on setting for 200 ml using 1.5 gelatine sheets.

Trial two

Based on Custard part of trifle recipe in Heston Bulmethal’s ‘Further adventures in search of perfection’, p 294.  Target temperature is 75 degrees.  Used 80 degrees (in choice between 70 and 80) as it worked pretty well in trial 1.  All ingredients added in one go (like trial 1).  Used 3 yolks (45g vs. 50g recipe quantity) vs. the 4 in trial 1. Used half fat milk rather than whole.  Used vanilla essence rather than saffron (same qty as trial 1).  Run at speed 2 to get slightly less air in.  Set was with 1g of gelatine sheet (half a sheet) – volume was also lower that trial one, and in fact this is still twice what was in Heston’s recipe (oops!).  But, good to try, as approx 50% of what was used in trial 1.

Hot it tasted not only creamier, but also sweeter.  Same amount of sugar was included, but liquid volume was only 150ml which probably explains it.  So, might be able to drop the sugar by 40% to match trial one.  There was less air in both the hot and set versions.  Much yellower colour than for trial 1.

Outcomes from trial 1 and 2

Trial 1 was better for non-set, whether hot or cold, and even guessing for the correction for sugar in trial 2.  But, needed less air, so speed 2 more appropriate.

Trial 2 was better for set, with a much creamier mouth feel and deeper yellow colour.  Only issue was that it hadn’t set enough after an hour – worth trying with slightly more gelatine, along with less sugar. That was true even allowing for the extent of setting,which was much too much for trial 1.

Trial 3,4

Same basis as trial 2, but only 60% of the sugar, and using the seeds from a vanilla pod rather than vanilla essence.  Used 75g of milk rather than 50g.  And, 150% (trial 3) and 200% (trial 4) of the gelatine.

Came out runnier (as you’d expect for slightly more milk).  But, only intended to be used as a set custard, so need to wait to assess.  As they went into the fridge, looking at trial 3, the vanilla seeds appear to have settled out somewhat – for trial 4 they are still well blended.

Outcomes from trial 3 and 4

In trial 3 the gelatine sheet hadn’t been properly melted – the result was lovely, but not set.  Trial 4 was firmly set, so splitting the difference, trial 3 should be the right amount of gelatine (if actually melted!).  Use of Vanilla seeds rather than vanilla essence didn’t really feel like it added much.  Sweetness was about right.

Press guilty as charged over crap survey (yet again)

In  weak moment at breakfast on Tuesday I was flicking through the Scotsman paper.  There was an article on page 16 proclaiming under the banner of ‘staff guilty as charged over mobiles’ (see here, and also in the Metro) that workers charging their phones at work were costing employers £1.5 billion per year.  Charging a phone feels like a small thing, and this is a seriously big number so it deserves a sanity check bit of mental maths.

Mine was to guess that that there are 30 million workers in the UK, with the survey noting that half saying they charged their phone, so around £100 per person per year per charger.  At a guessed 10p for a marginal kWh of electricity, that is 20 kWh per week, 3 kWh/day, or over 100 Watts if used 24 hours a day.  At a guessed 10 watts for a charger, the figure is over 10 times too high, and probably more like 30 times too high (based on an 8 hour day).

So, what is the actual source of this fantastical (and wrong) number.  Well, it comes from a uSwitch press release (see here).  The explanation given is :-

When asked “Do you ever deliberately charge your phone or other gadgets at work to save on household bills?” 3.8% said “yes, all of the time”; 16.2% said “Yes, some of the time” meaning 20% said yes. 29.2% said “I charge my items at work, but not to save money”. This means that 49.2% of workers charge their phones or gadgets at work. When asked how much they save by charging gadgets at work the average amount was £9.18 a month, which equates to £110.16 a year. Based on ONS stats which show that there are 29.1 million people working in the UK (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/october-2011/index.html), this means that (0.492 x29.1) x 110.16 = £1.577 billion is spent charging gadgets each year.

So, the glaring point is that they just asked people how much they saved by charging their phone, and took the average of the responses.  Then, having asked for a figure that most people would be unlikely to know without effort (and who knows what the consumers responses really were), they didn’t even bother to do sanity check on it.  They just published.  And the Scotsman and Metro just used it, again without any sight of engaging their brains.

Of course, this was probably just a silly article many pages in, that may not have had the scrutiny it should … oh no, wait, the Scotsman did a leader on it as well!

Superb lunch at Sat Bains development kitchen

This weekend, for Kat’s birthday, we went to Sat Bains, (the name of the restaurant, and the name of the proprietor and chef).  We are lucky enough to have been a few times before, to the main restaurant, and always had a super meal.  This time, by happy accident, Sara booked lunch in the development kitchen (see here).

The idea is simple – you eat at a breakfast bar that is part of a small kitchen that is used to try out new ideas.  But, the chance to chat to the chef throughout the meal makes it a much more engaging and educational experience.  In our case, the chef was Nanna Vestergaard who was absolutely excellent – interested, knowledgeable, inquisitive, chatty, as well as clearly being an excellent cook.  And the food was, unsurprisingly, outstanding (just like the last times we have eaten there).

We’ve come away with all sorts of ideas to try, for much of which we have the right kit (sous vide water bath and the like).  And, feeling that we should really really invest in a centrifuge, though maybe a little smaller than the 3 litre one they had.  Ok, maybe this is stretching the definition of ‘invest’ well beyond the normal meaning, but I WANT one!

Our previous best restaurant meal ever was  at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s three Michelin star restaurant.  The previous visits to Sat Bains were almost as enjoyable.  Almost.  This was as good – a different experience, but we loved it.  Anyway, if you have a chance, and you are anywhere near Nottingham, do try and book a visit to Sat Bains, and if you like to know how the food is made, go for the development kitchen.  Either way, it is SO much better than a normal meal out, even if you go to otherwise good restaurants.