Lemon and Chocolate

[minoanmiss]

Separately rather than together. For redbird.

1) I bought five beautiful buxom Buddha's Hand Citrons from Pearson Ranch with the money other people use to buy shoes and scarves. I wish I could have kept them in a bowl on the table forever, radiating their fresh sunshiny scent, but time comes for us all. I gave one to the neighbors because I like them and the wife is a foodie; I have one soaking in alcohol; I have one cut up with sugar; and I have one I intend to shred and marmalade but I want A to see it first. Because tentacletrog.

2) Controversial chocolate statement: chocolate should be cooked no more than medium rare, a la a brownie. I think the beautiful scent of a chocolate cake baking or a chocolate custard cooking is flavor escaping into the air. I far prefer chocolate chip ice cream to chocolate ice cream for this reason, and cake with chocolate frosting to chocolate cake.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

A luscious post!

I take your point about chocolate cake.

But what of the FIFTH LEMON

[bikergeek]

The Fifth Lemon sounds like a 1970s spy novel.

[radiantfracture]

Set in Greece!

[radiantfracture]

Sorry, citron. I ought to have read more closely.

[minoanmiss]

Haha Fifth Lemon was hilarious. Pieces of it went into the other dishes.
Sent from my iPhone

[teenybuffalo]

I agree with the sentiments here expressed, and also thank you for coining the word tentacletrog.

[redbird]

Thank you. I don't remember asking for this, but I like it.

I disagree with you about chocolate, at least in ice cream. I don't know how cooked the chocolate syrup I just put on my ice cream is, though. It's U-Bet, because that's the readily available non-dairy chocolate syrup, which Adrian can eat.

[lunabee34]

I'm glad you have good neighbors.

[minoanmiss]

OMG so am I. I adore them.

[flamingsword]

Sometimes the smell of baking chocolate is half the reason I am making something, especially now that sugar is such a dicey problem. But sometimes I like flourless chocolate cake for this reason. Gods, I love those things. Have to figure out a low-sugar recipe for one this year.

[dissectionist]

A chocolate ice cream - or any ice cream - shouldn’t be significantly cooked. You want the custard (if it’s not a Philly-style ice cream) simmered just long enough to render the eggs safe, and that’s it. (Philly-style doesn’t contain eggs, so you can just throw one together without cooking. It’d be difficult to get the cocoa powder to mix smoothly and properly without a bit of heating, though, and grainy texture would carry through to the finished ice cream.)

If you start with a high-quality cocoa powder, I guarantee that even if you can smell a bit of chocolate during the cooking process, the end result will still be a powerful chocolate ice cream. (In case anyone else is interested, after a lot of research into what professional/artisan ice-cream makers were using, I started using Cocoa Barry Extra Brute, and I’ve never looked back. It compares to the Hershey’s cocoa in the grocery store like a Renaissance master’s painting compares to a kindergartner’s fingerpaint scribble. They’re not even in the same universe of flavor and fat content - 22-24% for CB, versus 10% for Hershey’s, and fat content matters in an ice cream.)

With regards to chocolate chips, their creation involves the cocoa beans being roasted, then all the ingredients ground and mixed, then the liquid chocolate gets conched (kept in a hot molten state for several more hours to bring out flavor), then tempered (heating and cooling repeatedly) for texture/stabilization. By the time they reach you, chocolate chips and their components have already been through extended heating and processing. A half-hour of baking or a few minutes of simmering for custard is nothing compared to what they’ve been through before.

So with either cocoa powder or chocolate chips, it’s accurate to say that they’re well-done by the time they reach us. If you don’t want chocolate ice cream because you don’t like it, that’s totally reasonable. But the chocolate being cooked to well-done was out of our hands long before the cocoa/chips were ever in them. :)

My unpopular opinion on this topic: chocolate chips are awkward in ice cream, creating a sudden too-much digression of flavor that pulls away from the whole, and creates a strange mouthfeel due to having a chunk of partially frozen chocolate in your mouth. Melt the chips and do stracciatella (drizzle the melted chocolate into the ice cream during churning, where it freezes and the paddles break it into small, delicate shreds of chocolate mixed throughout the ice cream) instead, because this avoids discontinuity of flavor and texture while still providing pleasing little punches of chocolate.

[magid]

I agree with you about chocolate chips being undesirable in ice cream format. To me, they're cold enough that they're just texture, not flavor, and not a pleasant texture at that. If I want something to add to ice cream with chocolate nature, bits of brownies are excellent.

[minoanmiss]

reads and is delighted I knew everyone would disagree edifyingly with me. :D

I've seen chocolate made (my family's from Jamaica) but what I mean about "medium rare" is that I think that's enough cooking and that even more starts vaporizing flavor molecules.

I love those little flat melted-then-frozen bits of chocolate in properly made chip ice cream. Nuts.com sells them by themselves, just little flat pieces of chocolate. Om nom surface area nom!

[dissectionist]

Right? Those chocolate bits are delicate. It’s the same reason why, if we use nuts in ice cream, we’re not throwing whole almonds or whole walnuts in. Ice cream is a careful balance of textures, flavors, the textures of mix-ins, and the flavors of mix-ins. Do too much or not enough of any one thing and the whole balance is upset.

I hope I get to make my smoky chocolate cinnamon ice cream for you sometime. It’s built around a campfire s’mores concept, so I cold-smoke the cocoa powder with fruitwood to bring the smoke into it, mess with the texture to create a more marshmallow-y like mouthfeel, add a bit of cayenne (because if there’s smoke then there should be a hint of fire), and then freeze it as an ice-cream pie in a graham cracker crust. I’ve made a lot of cool ice cream recipes but that one is my hands-down favorite.

[acelightning73]

Some of the delicious smell is flavor molecules evaporating from the cake or whatever. But I think some of that depends on whether it's solid chocolate in the recipe or cocoa. My cocoa-enhanced angel food cake smells divine when it's baking, and taste exactly the way it smelled. Cocoa seems to give food a deeeper, richer chocolate flavor than chocolate itself. I suspect because the way cocoa is processed seems to make it easier to release the flavor and aroma molecules into food. (I wish I could find an Aztec to discuss this with!)

[minoanmiss]

You know, I do agree with you about cocoa, and I'll have to think about why this is. I find cooked cocoa preparations, from hot chocolate to chocolate cake, do retain more flavor aand broader flavor than cooked chcolate preparations (on which everyone dsisagrees with me ahahahaha)

[acelightning73]

I suspect it's because cocoa is made from the "cocoa liquor", the liquid left after all the cocoa butter has been extracted. The flavor and aroma chemicals are more prominent in the liquid, and when it's dehydrated into cocoa powder, they are more stable. But the cooking techniques that blend cocoa into a cake, or a cup of hot chocolate, allow more of the flavor to be incorporated into the food. For cakes, you mix powdered cocoa with boiling water, and let it cool to room temperature, and blend it into the cake batter. For a cup of hot cocoa, you're supposed to blend the powder with milk first, and then stir in some cool or hot milk until it's drinkable.