Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home Author: Visit Amazon's Jeni Britton Bauer Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1579654363 | Format: PDF
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home Description
Review
“Ice cream perfection in a word: Jeni’s.”
–Washington Post
(Washington Post)
Review
"Original and inspiring. She brings an artist's imagination and wit to the table, and astonishingly delicious flavors. Brava!"
–David Tanis, author of Heart of the Artichoke
(David Tanis)
See all Editorial Reviews
- Hardcover: 217 pages
- Publisher: Artisan; First Edition edition (June 15, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1579654363
- ISBN-13: 978-1579654368
- Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Since buying this book, I've tried four of Jeni's recipes: Goat Cheese and Roasted Cherries, Salty Caramel, Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream in the World, and Buckeye State. Perfect results with all of them! Just follow the recipe, and you really will get Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream at Home.
Before getting started, I'd recommend reading the first chapter of the book with Jeni's notes, tips, and explanation of the science behind making a great ice cream. As far as equipment goes, you'll need an electric ice cream machine (Jeni uses the Cuisinart Ice-20), whisk, 4-quart or larger pot, 2-3 mixing bowls, gallon size ziploc bags, ice cream storage container, parchment paper, and a big bowl for creating an ice bath. Other tools that comes in handy: a knife for chopping up larger ingredients, cherry pitter if you plan on making anything with cherries in it, digital kitchen scale, and double boiler for melting chocolate. You'll want an extra freezing canister if you plan on making more than one batch a day. For cooking the ice cream mixture, Jeni recommends a 4 quart pot, but I've been using a 6-quart stock pot and couldn't imagine anything smaller. When boiling your cream mixture, it could easily boil over, if your pot isn't big enough.
Basic Ice Cream Ingredients: you'll need heavy cream, whole milk, cornstarch or tapioca starch, sugar, salt, cream cheese, and light corn syrup/glucose syrup. Each recipe will also call for different additional ingredients like vanilla extract or beans, chocolate, natural peanut butter, spices, honey, nuts, liquor, etc. As with all cooking, the better the ingredients: the better the product. Buy organic ingredients and non-homogenized dairy products if you can, and splurge on the "good" chocolate...all this effort deserves the good chocolate!
I don't live anywhere near Jeni's shops, so I've never bought her ice cream and cannot comment on whether these recipes really taste like what she sells at her shop. Other reviewers seem to say it does, so if you already love her ice cream, you might be very pleased with the book. I, on the other hand, found these recipes disappointing.
I got the book about a year ago, and have been experimenting with the recipes ever since. I was excited to learn of a technique for making egg free ice cream with a super smooth texture that will stay smooth even after freezer storage for days. Many ice cream recipes call for eggs, and cooking the egg/cream/milk/sugar mixture it into a custard. These custard based ice creams do stay nice and smooth in the freezer for a long time, but I was interested in learning about Jeni's egg free technique, for when I have no eggs or for when I'll be serving it to someone who cannot eat eggs.
All the recipes use an interesting strategy for binding the water, which helps prevent ice crystals from forming (ice crystals give ice cream a gritty texture). The milk/cream is boiled for 4 minutes to denature the proteins, then a corn starch slurry is added and it's cooked for another minute to thicken it. Some corn syrup is used because it is high in glucose, which binds water better than table sugar. Finally, cream cheese is added (or evaporated milk, in the case of one of the chocolate recipes), for "body".
I've made many batches with this technique, usually experimenting with either vanilla or chocolate, since we eat a lot of that, but I tried about 10 different flavors in all.
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