Making Orange Ice Cream from Bad to Good

Hi everybody, welcome back to Polar Ice Creamery. I'm Nick and today is a first video of its kind for us where I'm actually going to look at a recipe one of our subscribers sent over via Ko-fi, we'll go into that later. They're trying to create a recipe with oranges. Oranges aren't really a problem to use in ice cream. They're a fruit like any other. It's a citrus fruit, obviously. They're not particularly strong in flavour, surprisingly, when you use them. But what I'm going to do here is do a two-part video of the recipe that I've been sent. I've made it in its entirety and then the next one or the part two for this will be how we're actually going to make the ice cream recipe for our subscriber. So make sure you like and subscribe so you don't miss out on part two. The recipe that we've been sent was cream milk dextrose, an orange reduction, skim milk powder and then a medium egg. It's very short on ingredients which is fine because you can make some really good ice creams and gelatos with minimal ingredients. But what they've done is they've actually juiced five oranges and then added sugar to those and created a reduction. And that is what we're going to do here where we show you how we make this person's recipe. So what we're going to do is we're going start with our five oranges. These are a medium to large orange. We're going to take those, cut them in half, completely juice them, put that juice back into the pan. We're going to turn the heat on and to that we're going to add 100 grams of sugar. It's just straight sucrose and we're going to boil this within an inch of its life. We're going to create a reduction by half so that means we started here with about 210 grams by weight. We're going to reduce that down to approximately 100 grams by weight. This is going to take a while. This took me almost an hour and that was really boiling it heavy. But as you can see we got there in the end. We took our reduction out of the pan and put it in a nice little pot and let that cool down a little bit. Then what we do is we start adding the rest of our ingredients into the pan because we're going to create this ice cream base. So we're going to start with our milk and we're going to add the dextrose and as you can see the orange reduction has actually gone much darker in colour. Now I don't know why that's happened. There's obviously a reason for it but it's likely the exposure to oxygen after the reduction process. So we're going to add that into our milk. Make sure it's nicely combined and then once it comes up to a slightly higher temperature we're going to get our skim milk powder in there and dissolve that. Make sure it's completely homogenised. At this stage you add your whole egg or what I've actually done is used silk gel because I was going to use an egg but they'd all gone off. So it's silk gel all the way. What is silk gel? Well I'll talk about that again in a minute but essentially it is an emulsifier and that is what you're doing here. You're emulsifying these base ingredients. When that's ready and your egg is completely mixed in we're going to empty that into a container and add in our cream. Make sure it's completely mixed up and put that in the fridge to chill down. After about three or four hours once that base is chilled down in the fridge you're going to take it out and pop it in your ice cream machine as normal. As you can see here it really struggled to actually freeze it and we'll talk about why in a minute but after 25 minutes my machine would not freeze this ice cream to what I consider an acceptable level. So I decided to stop there take it out the machine put it in a container and stick it in the freezer. So we've got the orange creation here we're going to get some scooped up and see what the result is. There we go scoop it was really soft really soft and you can tell when opening the tub that it didn't really have any structure when I took it out the machine it was super smooth on top. It's uh let's just eat some let's just try it see what it tastes like. Okay it's really odd it's really odd in respect that the texture is kind of borderline sherbet in a way but sherbet has much less fat in it than this does it doesn't taste of orange at all really weirdly enough considering what's gone in it it's it's just very strange. So silk gel. Silk gel is mono and diglycerides of fatty acids for you know the science ones out there what does it do it emulsifies your fats and waters together to create a slightly smoother texture in your ice cream and essentially that is what an egg yolk does. Egg yolks have a certain amount of fats in they're not really enough to change your recipe too much but they have lecithin in there and lecithin is an emulsifier and that's why custards have a more luxurious kind of texture to them because the lecithin allows the bond of fats and waters to become much more stable within your ice cream environment so you don't get lumps of this and lumps of that it's all really nicely combined and blended within your ice cream base. Now eggs are much easier to get hold of than silk gel or diglycerides of fatty acids but if you want to try silk gel specialists or special ingredients you can get everything from them I do it's not an advert from them I'm not affiliated with them at all they just happen to sell a lot of stuff that is really quite handy for home ice cream makers so check out the website I'll put a link below if you want to have a look at what they do you can buy it on amazon pretty much all over the world so that's a good place to start. Would an egg have changed this recipe I doubt it there's some issues with the flavour alone the fact it doesn't taste of orange and it's not a particularly well balanced recipe it's obviously failed for a few reasons I think but what we're gonna do is we're gonna stop here and I'm gonna in part two show you how we fixed this recipe for our subscriber to create a really strong nicely emulsified orange ice cream. Awkward transition over I was going to do this as a two-parter but my wife convinced me to just link the two together orange ice cream just to recap from the first half of this video I was sent a recipe by someone on ko-fi which is our version of patreon I'll put some links below if you fancy supporting us and that could be any way you like but check out the link below any kind of support that you offer will help. I made that orange ice cream to see what it was like before doing anything the only thing I didn't do was the egg because the eggs I had in the house had gone off but there were some intrinsic problems with that and one was it was a really gummy texture it was kind of slimy in a way it had an unusual texture because it was an unbalanced or imbalanced recipe for a few reasons actually but the biggest problem that the ice cream had was it didn't taste of anything at all it literally tasted of nothing it didn't taste of orange whatsoever and you think that with all that orange juice it should that's actually where citrus ice creams differ because the flavor isn't in the juice the majority of the flavor comes from the oils the essential oils in the rind so when you buy an orange or lemon extract what you're doing is you're buying something where somebody has soaked orange rind or zest into the base glycerin or vodka alcohol something like that and created a much stronger extract of that flavor so by not using the stronger part or the stronger flavor part of the orange they really missed a trick but then that's why they came here to ask for help with this so what I did was recreated the recipe by using an ice cream calculator to get the base ingredients in tune make sure that the actual resulting ice cream is going to be texturally right and then we flavored it in a very different way how do we do it let's have a look so like we did on the last recipe we're going to take our oranges these are much bigger oranges than I used before and we're going to take three of these and juice them properly now look when you see the orange cut in half there that's all the juice that I managed to get out of that first half and you know why because I didn't roll it I didn't squeeze it if your oranges are not quite ripe make sure you roll them on a surface really really well that loosens up all the flesh and allows that to release the juice properly when you squeeze them that one little squeeze there gave us 25 grams worth of juice now actually in the remaining two and a half oranges I got the complete amount that I needed which was 200 grams so that tells you how much extra you get from the other halves anyway enough about juicing oranges what we did then we took our orange juice and strained it through a sieve into the pan we don't want those random bits that was in the first version of this ice cream it just wasn't good texturally once that's all completely squeezed in that juice in your pan you're going to turn the heat on and then add in your sugar we've added 160 grams of our total sugar here there's 20 grams left on the side and that's our milk powder at the top but you're going to heat up your orange and sugar base now you're going to get that water evaporating off what you're actually doing at this stage is you are creating an invert sugar you're creating an invert sugar with the orange juice and the sugars you already want to use in your recipe it does take a while to do but you need to keep an eye on it when it's on the hob I took my eyes off this mix for maybe 10 or 15 seconds and as you can see it all boiled over I made an absolute triumphant mess luckily I was left with the 100 grams of mix that I needed so what we did is take that I put that back in the clean pan I added in the last remaining 20 grams of sugar once that was up to a suitable temperature I added in the milk powder again every milk powder is different mine takes ages to dissolve but when it was finally dissolved I took the rind from one of the large oranges and if you listen closely you can actually hear the essential oils coming out and hitting those bubbles on top of that base that's where the flavor is you're just going to leave that heat ticking over for a couple of minutes and you're going to start to infuse that orange flavor from the rind into your base that stage you can turn the heat off put the mix into a container and then pop it in a fridge overnight and here we go the ice cream has been in the freezer for almost a week and just to touch up on a couple of those elements the flavor comes from the rind predominantly not so much the juice there is orange flavor or lemon flavor or whatever substitute you're using in the juice itself but the majority of it comes from the essential oils in the rind that's why you steep that in your base for a long old time and I took it out the rind just for churning as you could see in the video you don't want it in there really a texture it'd be horrible but you can and I love putting grated zest or rind whatever you want to call it into ice creams like lemon I do it all the time orange this is actually only a second time I've made orange ice cream but if I made it again I probably would grate some of that in there it really would boost the flavor but this flavor on here was pretty strong as it is but remember the sugars thing the invert sugar when you're creating an invert sugar remember that you're creating two different strains of sugar than the glucose and the fructose they have very different effects on your ice cream there's a whole list of sugars I'll do a whole separate video on on the different sugars and what they do to your ice cream another time but glucose and fructose will soften your ice cream much more than sucrose will so what we're going to do get some scooped up and then I'll show you the result and we'll just go from there nice scoop it's a much more traditional texture the ice cream has actually been out for probably 10 minutes at this stage but it does scoop reasonably well from the freezer I'd probably say a couple of minutes out makes it a bit easier to scoop you can increase the sugars if you really want to but I don't think you need to color wise it's a much more natural color the first one the orange juice after that was boiled it went a much darker color over once it cooled I don't know why that is this stuff didn't really do that so it's got a much more natural kind of very slight orange tinge to it so you know there's no artificial colors in this it is what you get from that what does it taste like really strong orange flavor that's what you want nice texture no ice crystals in there it's just a smooth natural no add-ins obviously in this this is just orange I mean this could work you know a reverse chocolate orange ice cream with chocolate stracciatella in there that'd be quite nice I imagine but it's a really nice straightforward orange ice cream cuts through that citrus will cut through heavy things you know so you can use this with maybe a brownie or some chocolate cake or something it'll cut through that dense chocolate fatty kind of cake or whatever it is that you're eating with but this is a really really nice ice cream if you want something simple like a lemon orange you know any kind of citrus fruit you'll make it the same way just substitute the fruit itself and what you'll be left with is a really nice pungent flavor ice cream natural colors I hope you try this one don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you next time also don't forget you can send us messages on ko-fi I'll put the link below on the screen and in the description if you want help with your ice cream recipes you can hit us up there and we'll sort out any recipe you like or any other questions relating to your ice cream you may have so hopefully we'll see you there