Tag: science

Posted on

Freshly pressed olive oil gelato

November is the month where Tuscany olive trees are harvested for olives, then pressed communally to give the new extra virgin olive oil, green and peppery and fruity. Depending on the amount of olives, you may obtain ‘your’ oil or, like in my case, you combine your olives with those of a few friends to reach the minimum amount required by the mill for a single press batch.

So, I decided to make gelato (or better, my ‘something in between gelato and ice cream’ given that I use more fat than people normally use for gelato) with the new olive oil.

As you will learn if you take my course 😉 vegetable oils are not considered ideal as the mono-/poly-unsaturated fatty acids do not behave properly in the churning/freezing process. But as we have seen already in a previous post, this issue can be overcome through the use of some natural additives, forming so-called oleogels. I have used beeswax, carnauba wax, and for this recipe I used citrus fiber, which has a more neutral odour profile – I did not want to cover the flavour of the amazing oil.

I mixed all the powders and dissolved them in water bringing them to 42°C. I then added the cashew butter blending well, and finally the olive oil. Chilled for 4 hours in the fridge then churned.

Really nice! Especially when served with some freshly ground black pepper.

%QTY (grams)
water60452
sucrose1288
cashews1073
olive oil860
vegetable fibers (acacia/inulin)644
dextrose324
vegetable fibers (citrus)0.74.9
salt0.42.6
guar/xanthan 7/30.11
total 100750
Calculated freezing temperature-2°C, serving temperature around -9°C

My ice creams are designed to be served at -9°C so they will become very hard in a normal home freezer. You can reduce/remove some of the fibers – not the citrus fiber in this case!, but I bet some lemon zest would do the trick 😉 – and increase the sugar/s content, as in the following version, for example

%QTY for 1 Kg
water60602
sucrose16157
cashews1098
olive oil880
dextrose552,2
vegetable fibers (citrus)0,77
salt0,44
guar/xanthan 7/30.131.3
total1001000

Posted on

Oleogels in ice cream

The other day I was reading a paper about the use of oleogels in ice cream. Essentially, some molecules can be mixed with low-temperature-freezing fats to make them thicker and therefore more suitable for ice cream, where fat crystals play a very important role in the stabilisation of air. If the fat remains liquid at low temperatures, its network collapses and becomes way less efficient in keep the ice cream structure up. All stuff that I explain in great detail in my ‘Introduction to (vegan) ice cream’ course, in case you are interested :-).

The article mentioned beeswax as one of the possible ‘gelators’ – I know we are out of the vegan ice cream realm, but I happen to have a beehive and collect some honey when the bees make a lot and keep the opercles (the cell lids). Over the years, I collected a block of wax in the cupboard that I have used to make hand cream and candles.

A vegan alternative can be carnauba wax which is sourced from plants. I will definitely try it next. There is some literature already published.

To prepare the oleogel, I heated some olive oil in a bain marie and fully dissolved beeswax in it, stirring well. The oily mixture contained 7% beeswax. I left the mix cool down to a lip balm texture and then used in in place of the coconut oil in my standard white base (for example, the one I published recently). I used refined olive oil to avoid covering any off-flavours but this method opens up the option to use different cultivars of extra-virgin olive oil.

The mix looked very nice and smooth, it cooled to a viscous cream – as I was expecting, and it churned beautifully. And what is important, it has a really nice flavour.

It also melts well, homogeneously so it really looks nice and promising for more experiments.

I am very pleased with the results so far. Now I can use local oil for a variety of interestingly flavoured ice creams, feel a bit less guilty about deforestation and of course have an answer for those people arguing that coconut oil and saturated fats are bad for me. Hooray!