Alternative Title: Cooking, with gas or otherwise.

Note, this post has been ready for a good few weeks now, sans editing. My “editor” (read: partner who has a linguistics degree) was finishing off a PhD (in genetics, not linguistics; she did two bachelors), then we went on a trip interstate. While interstate, I got a respiratory virus that three tests tell me wasn’t COVID but who knows with Rapid Antibody Tests. I’ve still been making ice cream batches so I’ll have a new post up soon talking about my experiments with making my own nut milks, along with a recipe for a much simpler ice cream base for those who don’t quite have access to some of the esoteric ingredients I’ve been calling for.

So – my first ‘update’ post, if you will!

This is obviously a little silly as I’ve had a grand total of one person other than me make an account here (hi!) and no subscriber stuff is up. However, there are a few things I wanted to note for future readers about stuff I’ve learnt in my ice cream experimentation so far that I thought I’d record here for posterity.

First thing first – vegan white chocolate is hard. I’ve been trying to replicate a white chocolate flavour with cocoa butter, and it turns out that many cocoa butters from around the world vary a lot in flavour. Specifically, some are pleasant, some are not. For this reason, most white chocolates are made with refined cocoa butter, which has a far milder flavour and odour. My first thought was that what I think of as ‘white chocolate’ flavour may very well just be ‘milk powder and sugar’ flavour. So I went out there and just, well, tried a couple of brands of vegan white chocolate. One of them, ‘Almond Bliss Vego’, was pretty good and tasted distinctly ‘white chocolatey’ to me, but I’m actually wondering if that was more ‘almondy’. The other, ‘Sweet William’, tasted more like an ingredient then a serviceable eating white chocolate. It was kinda bland with a not great mouth feel, and I tried to make an ice cream out of it and it was just… okay.

I’ve also learned that vegan dulce de leche is hard for a similar reason. I’ve seen lots of descriptions of what dulce de leche is, and I think the way I’d describe it is ‘sweet toasted milk’. That sounds a little strange, but the point it illustrates is that the flavour is very much bound up in the milk used to make it. making dulce de leche with oat milk resulted in some notes of toasted oats, but I don’t think it tasted quite as good as dairy-based dulce. I want to try other plant-based milks to see what I think works best.

While reducing the milk for the dulce de leche, I also observed that the batch with more pea protein tasted significantly more bitter than the one with less. I’ve found some of my ice creams developing those same bitter notes. This almost certainly stems from me becoming lazier with my heating methods and not stirring on as low a heat as I should have been. Because of this, I’m swapping all my recipes over to a double boiler method. This has improved the quality of my ice cream, with the lower and slower heat helping things come together a lot more nicely. I’ll update all my recipes to reflect this new method. Really, I should have been using a double boiler from the start – after all I used to do all my ice cream making that way, at the recommendation of Nick Palumbo. This might seem to invite the question ‘why did you go against the advice of the person who runs one of the best gelato chains in your country’, but in my defence, some of Palumbo’s recommendations are very much associated with commercial concerns. Specifically, Palumbo heats many of his custards for a whole 30 minutes for food safety reasons. These higher standards make sense for someone wanting to totally eliminate food poisoning risk, but this is literally a full-on pasteurisation that most recipes aimed at home cooks do not include. However, while it may not be necessary to home-pasteurise your ice cream for safety reasons, the lower and slower approach does work so much more nicely for some of the more delicate plant-based milks.

All in all, getting a website started so far has been an interesting experience. Right now I’m avoiding SEO and advertising on principle, which means that I pretty much won’t show up on Google at all. Sure, you can search ‘the churning bush’ and come here, but searching ‘the churning bush cookies and cream’ won’t get you my site at all – and forget just ‘vegan cookies and cream’. I’d like to show up on Google eventually, but I know people loathe the huge pre-ambles before recipes. I know my recipes have some introductory material, but only because I want to share relevant information, and even then, I have a skip button. Certainly, I won’t be adding origin stories. I’ll probably dabble with some SEO stuff later, if only because it’d be nice if I wasn’t just shouting into the void here.

Anyway, thanks for reading this update; I’m looking forward to sharing more recipes. For now, I’m continuing to work on the recipes mentioned above, as well as my first recipe request. This comes from a good friend of mine, who is looking for a recipe to replicate a snickerdoodle cookie dough ice cream she quite likes.