A Rant (Homage)

I really enjoy Use Real Butter, a food blog by Jen Yu. She lives in Colorado, is beating the crap out of cancer, and has a beautiful dog. Her photographs are to die for, as are her kitchen skills.

Last month, she joined a group called the Daring Bakers in making a hazelnut genoise. Sounds great, right? Except the recipe kind of sucked. She said so, in no uncertain terms. It was hilarious. So in her honor, and in the same vein:

Why the Sharffengerger Dark Chocolate Ice Cream Recipe Is No Good:

1. It calls for 3.5 ounces of 62% bittersweet chocolate. That's one bar plus half an ounce. Nice.

2. The recipe says to whisk 4 egg yolks with 3/4 of a cup of sugar, then add 1/4cup plus 3 tablespoons of cocoa. Fine.

This is going to be the base of a custard. That means that after I mix them all up I'll need to add hot milk slowly to "temper" the custard. If I fail, I get scrambled eggs. The best way to avoid failure is to whisk constantly while streaming in a bit of hot milk.

Now, think about those proportions, dry to wet. They don't work. Sugar plus egg yolks works fine, you get just the sort of paste you'd want for tempering. Add the cocoa, though, and you get a totally unmanageable, thick goo that solidifies inside your balloon whisk so you cannot even stir, much less whisk.

Goodbye, keep it moving. Goodbye, proper tempering. Hello! Little flecks of scrambled eggs in the strainer. I couldn't even get it out with my spatula, or off the spatula once I ground some off the whisk.

3. The recipe calls for making a quick dark caramel. The quantities are: 2 tablespoons of sugar to 2 teaspoons of water.

You heat that on high and when it's dark brown you drizzle it into the warm chocolate custard mixture. I'm not sure what this is supposed to accomplish. At dark caramel, what you've got is basically hard-ball stage candy. It hits a cooler liquid and it...solidifies! Obviously.

So you're whisking in strings of hard candy. The recipe says "may need to strain." Uh, yeah. And you'll strain that caramel right out, genius. It will also stick to your spoon/spatula. It will also make such a tiny amount of caramel that you can't really get it out of your smallest pan, so it will be stuck to the sides requiring much soaking and one whole scrubby pad for cleaning.

The base looks not-so-good. It's cooling. Then I'll chill it. Then I'll churn it. Then I'll freeze it hard. Then, finally, after doing an entire double sink worth of dishes thanks to the enormous mess this travesty has created, I'll taste it.

Charles said, "Why not wait to rant until you taste it?" Becuase it's chocolate ice cream. Not an exotic flavor or even an unusual ingredient. I can buy it anytime I want. So how good will it have to be to justify all the effort and frustration? It had better be ambrosia.