Ice Cream! Well, OK, it's Wednesday Food in the NY Times...

[lsanderson]

Scientists to Ice Cream Makers in a Flash
By CHRISTOPHER HALL
Boone, Iowa

SULTRY August is here - time for the Iowa State Fair - and a pair of Ph.D.'s in chemical engineering named Will Schroeder and T. J. Paskach know exactly what that means.
"We'll be scooping ice cream all day long for 11 straight days," Mr. Schroeder said recently at a business park outside this small town where he and Mr. Paskach have harnessed the latest high-tech toy for the world of avant-garde cuisine in a quest for perfect ice cream.
The two men are the founders of Blue Sky Creamery (blueskycreamery.net), which makes remarkably smooth, dense and flavorful ice cream using liquid nitrogen (minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit) in a flash freezer they invented and patented. It is the first liquid nitrogen ice cream to appear in grocery stores.

Dessert in the Land of Fairy Tales
By NICHOLE ACCETTOLA
COPENHAGEN

DENMARK is a place straight out of a dairy farmer's dream. The climate and soil make it ideal for raising healthy, productive cattle. And with the volumes of luscious milk they turn out, it isn't all that surprising that Danes have become makers of world-class cheeses and extraordinary butters. But in the last two years, they have also become crazy about ice cream, scooping it up, from the old-fashioned styles that are again popular to lighter, Italian-inspired versions.
"In Copenhagen, ice cream has become a gourmet food," said Else Bjorn, editor of aok.dk, the premier online guide to the city's food and entertainment scenes. "People don't want to buy their ice cream in 7-Eleven anymore. Now they want the good stuff and they don't mind waiting in long lines to get it."
And lines of people are exactly what customers can expect, especially at three of Copenhagen's best ice cream spots: Vaffelbageriet, Hawaii and Paradis.
Recipe: Nougat Ice Cream

Ice Dreams, Crystallizing
By MATT LEE and TED LEE

SUPERMARKETS devote so much square footage to ice creams and sorbets these days that churning your own at home can seem as pointless as whittling your own fork. But many of the flavors filling store freezers - with their peanut-butter-filled pretzels, cookie-dough pellets and stripes of marshmallow goo added in - spring from a very limited source of culinary creativity, as if they were proposed by an overcaffeinated 8-year-old. Most skew toward buttery, chocolaty flavors that can grow dull day after day.
Inventing an exciting, enticing new flavor of your own is among the best reasons to make ice creams and sorbets at home. (Freshness is another.)
Of course restaurants have led the charge in customizing ice creams, which range from the alluring to the lurid: balsamic vinegar, olive oil, gorgonzola, honeysuckle and rose are just a few flavoring agents we've encountered recently, many of them good.
But somewhere between the black olive ice cream and the cough drop sorbet are simple frozen concoctions that can surpass far more elaborate desserts. And all you have to do is dream them up, because making them is insanely easy.
Recipe: Gingersnap Ice Cream
Recipe: Raspberry Lime Rickey Sorbet
Recipe: Sour Cream Ice Cream
Recipe: Forest Berry Gelato

Shaving the Ice, Cutting the Heat
By DANA BOWEN

ON a sweltering day snow fell gently in the front window of the Dumpling Man's shop in the East Village, enticing sweaty passers-by.
At the counter Aaron Jones churned a pile of cold fluff from an antique Taiwanese contraption that swooshed a silver blade across a disc of ice. He drizzled the snow with malt syrup and gooey condensed milk, and ladled on sweet red beans.
At the sidewalk tables of Panya, a Japanese bakery around the corner, young people dived into sparkling mounds of ice etched with homemade green tea syrup.
And a few doors away, Otafuku served cups of bean-speckled slush. "They're our version of Italian ice," said Mayako Kawai, a Tokyo native standing in line.

These Cheeses Come Wrapped in Flavor
By FLORENCE FABRICANT

Paula Lambert, owner and founder of the Mozzarella Company in Dallas, has learned a thing or two from the cheesemakers in Banon, France, who have long wrapped goat cheese in grape or chestnut leaves. Ms. Lambert wraps fat little cylinders of fresh goat cheese in hoja santa (pronounced oh-ha santa) leaves, prized in Mexican cooking for their aromatic spiciness. The plant is also called Mexican pepperleaf or root beer plant, and the moist green leaves impart an alluring hint of sassafras, pepper and anise to the cheese. The cheeses, each weighing about five ounces, are $10.99 at Murray's Cheese Shop, and are $18.25 a pound plus shipping at mozzco.com.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I've made something very much like the Gingersnap Ice Cream mentioned in the third article, only substituting canned coconut milk for half the cream and adding a good quantity of chopped candied ginger. Fantastic stuff.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the inspiration - I could make ginger ice cream tonight. I have this nifty little hand-crank device that makes one serving.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Blue Sky is available at Byerly's and also at its shop down in Lakeville. It's really, really good stuff. The caramel ice cream with hot fudge poured over it is The Thing for me just now.

We used to make liquid nitrogen ice cream every year as an SPS activity (Society of Physics Students). It was most excellent then, too, and fun.

No, no, no...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

It's available at Lunds and then those funny named "Lunds" out in the 'burbs... ;-)

Re: No, no, no...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Can I just say how much I love living back where one can have this discussion?

timprov is a bit worried, because I have declared that I don't want to live more than an hour from a Lund's or Byerly's again, and he's afraid the chain will predecease us.

Re: No, no, no...

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

I have heard of a chain in upstate NY that is as good as Lunds/Byerly's. Maybe some day I'll find out. The stores in NYC for the most part suck and for the rest of the country I've lived in IMO they're mediocre at best.

Re: No, no, no...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We took a friend to Byerly's when he was in town, and he kept murmuring, "I would have to take pictures, and I'm still not sure people would believe this."

There was certainly nothing on its level in our part of the Bay Area. We looked.