Making the Chef

I had a nice thought, but I ruined it

I was making soup today in the kitchen. I like making soup. Soup is one of my few creative outlets. I can cook what I want, and it's always good. People see the love and notice it. I was ready to come back home and write a large post about how I love to make soup.

But something else happened.

I made ice cream today. Usually that's a good thing. Today it's a bad thing.

I made a batch of creme anglaise (that's ice cream base for you non-frenchies) and flavored it with some reduced Guinness (yummy ... although don't go trying to make a beer reduction sauce ... hops can cause big problems). After I put it in the ice cream machine to churn, I had to go upstairs to make some sabayon.

When I came back, the ice cream looked frozen. Good. Time to give it a quick taste test.

Tastes fine, but ... there's that texture. It's grainy. It's not the anglaise, it wasn't broken when I made it ... I even passed it through cheesecloth. So what was the grainyness? As I passed it around in my mouth, I realized with some amusement and horror that it was ...

BUTTER! I had made butter with ice cream. I didn't think that was possible.

So, I melted the ice cream back into creme anglaise, hoping to get a second chance at churning the creme. No dice. It's still butter. Throw the ruined creme anglaise down the drain, and just clock out and go home. Ice cream can wait until tomorrow. I'd already made a batch of vanilla and that would have to do for the day.

I vaguely remember that butter fat globules stay in suspension until heated to a certain temperature or agitated too much. So I either heated my creme anglaise too hot, my cream was ultra-pasteurized, or I overchurned my ice cream. I did add a new type of cream we had just gotten into the restaurant, so I need to check that in the morning to see if it's ultra-pasteurized. Or I could have just overchurned it.

I wish that's something they had explained back at school. Oh well ... I think the real tragedy here is the beer that wasn't able to live out its life as a happy little scoop of ice cream.

I would say that somewhere my pastry instructor is laughing ... but he's not. He's French. He'd just give a disgusted little smirk ... which, actually, makes me laugh even more about the whole thing.

posted by LindyChef @ 7:27 PM