Up to now I’ve had a Panasonic BH-941P, a little battery powered machine that goes into your freezer while it makes the ice cream. It did a decent job, but it was a bit of a fiddle.
Anyway, that is going on eBay now, as I have a proper machine – from Andrew James, who seem to do a good line of cheap domestic versions of professional gear. It cost me £140, and when it arrived it was about twice as big as I was expecting, which means I have had to rearrange my kitchen tops again.
However, it is brilliant. I wanted to test it out, before throwing out the packaging, but couldn’t be bothered to make a custard for a proper ice cream. But I did have a couple of 400g tubs of yoghurt.
Usually to make frozen yoghurt, you need to add sugar to get the freeze right. But these tubs come with a large swirl of fruit coulis (in this case lemon). Looking in the ingredients, I figured they had the sugar sorted, so I just tipped both tubs in.
An hour later, and I had a large bowl of the best tasting lemon frozen yoghurt I have ever tasted, and a large container of it in my freezer.
I think I am going to have fun with this!
Now where’s that recipe for Heston Blumenthal’s Bacon and Egg Ice Cream?
So, my quick and simple way of making frozen yoghurt – simply dump a tub of yoghurt with couli into the machine – worked well for eating it immediately after churning. It was delicious.
However, the pot I put in my freezer was not scoopable straight out of the freezer, although it was tasty to gnaw on the lump I carved off. When it finally defrosted enough to scoop, it also tasted great, but then I felt I couldn’t put the rest back in the freezer, having let it defrost.
There are many ways to change the freeze behaviour – changing the fat content, changing the sugar content, etc. Were I making proper ice-cream, this would probably take care of itself – ice-cream make from an egg-custard has protein from the egg-yolk, which also affects the way it freezes.
But for my “quick” frozen desert, I have just tried adding a squirt of liquid glucose to the yoghurt in the churning bucket. When I ate some freshly made, it hadn’t made it noticeably sweeter, but I understand it should affect the freeze, for a softer scoopable desert. If not, then I will try again, with a little more liquid glucose.
Once again, the yoghurt is hard and not scoopable after a night in the freezer. Although I am sure if I give it 30 minutes in the fridge, it will be fine.
Note that this isn’t a failure, as such, as what I am currently playing with is not in any of the recipe books. What I should do is get to making proper ice-cream from the recipes provided. But this experiment was fun to play with, and I will probably return to it again.