The first sous vide vacuum sealing I did at the Modernist Cuisine lab wasn’t to cook anything. It was to reseal an airtight package of vanilla beans.
The first time I used a pacojet, however, was to whir up some vanilla gelato. This lab is known for making pistachio gelato. It’s a completely smooth, creamy, dairy-free experience based on food processed pistachio and pistachio oil sweetened with sugar and thickened with lambda carageenan (a seaweed-based thickener a little like agar agar, I think) and locust bean gum (I recognized this one from a lot of gluten-free products, since gluten-free baked goods often fall apart and need something sticky to keep them together). The carageenan and locust do something similar to the egg yolks in Italian custard-based gelati – bind and thicken.
Why is a lactose intolerant girl going on about gelato she presumably can’t eat? Because there’s no dairy in it, and it’s hands down the creamiest cream-less ice cream around. I’ve eaten a lot of raw-vegan cashew and/or coconut milk/cream based creams, and they’re good, but the recipe here doesn’t matter as much as the tool. They feel like cheating – using high-fat nuts where only milk and, optionally, eggs should be involved. A paco jet costs around $3000 I think, and looks a fair bit like a counter-top coffee maker from an era before North America discovered that Italians do coffee better than Starbucks (Seattle, near where the lab is located, has yet to figure that out…). Aka 1996.
Before coming to the lab I’d read all about this pistachio gelato, which means I had no desire to make it. I did have a desire to make a lot of other gelati, though and my first was a macadamia nut-vanilla. I was trying to keep the nut flavour as neutral as possible and create the ultimate creamy dairy-free vanilla ice cream. It didn’t work.
Well the gelato worked perfectly but my roasted macadamia nuts were too strongly nutty and too salty, so my gelato was the same. Lab members who loved macadamia nuts loved it, though. Me, I don’t love macademia nuts.
I followed the same recipe as the pistachio gelato recipe (it’s in the new Modernist Cuisine at Home, which will be released in October I believe) but added the seeds of about 2 vanilla beans, so maybe it was the macademia nut oil I added that made it this way? I asked some of the lab chefs if you could not use the high fat nuts and still get as creamy a gelato (Sweetened almond milk, for example), but the nuts add that thickness, so the almond milk would have to be very thick. Maybe I could rotary evaporate it first…
Apparently you need the fat content so you don’t get ice crystals after spinning in the pacojet. I didn’t explain the pacojet did I? It’s just an incredibly high powered blender. I don’t want to know how much energy it uses, but it puts a vitamix blender to shame. I used one of those to blend my figs before centrifuging them, and it just ripped them apart like cotton candy.
But you’d get ice crystals in any ice cream maker if you used a fair bit of water, not enough sugar, and not enough fat, and I don’t think the fat is that important, because you can get incredibly creamy ice cream by simply blending frozen puréed or chunked mango. That’s going to be today’s test. So if the fat’s not that important, then I should be able to make creamy sorbets. Peaches and nectarines are incredible here right now, but the mixture needs to freeze solid for about 4 hours before you spin it in the paco jet, and this is my last day. Good thing it’s only 8am. There are a few sets of four hour windows before the end of the work day. That’s a lot of gelato to make…
My point, though admittedly vague, is that paco jets are wonderful things, and I will fore go coffee for the rest of my life if someone would give me one of these machines to make the creamiest dairy-free (and most often nut-free, because I’m okay with a little ice) sorbets and gelati. I’m still not sure about the best way to make low-fat vanilla gelato, to get that density without adding all those nuts and nut oils, because as I said, it’s only 8am.
The other gelato in the first photo is apparently strawberry. I don’t know if it’s nut based. I do know that it blended perfectly. I will go discover its secret, and then I will make it. And then I will eat it. It will be a good day.
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