“Once more into the fray...
Into the last good fight I'll ever know...
To live and die on this day...
To live and die on this day...”― The Grey
![Picture](/uploads/6/2/7/7/62779865/6112309_orig.jpg)
Perhaps it is a bit dramatic to open an ice cream blog with a quote from an epic story such as in The Grey. Certainly cooking pastry cream is far less dangerous than fighting off wolves in a land of arctic tundra and waist high snow. However, as with any instance in which my thin floridian blood enters temperatures lower than 75degrees, the dread that filled me walking into day 1 of Hot and Cold Desserts could have been argued surmountable to the icy chill Liam Neeson overcame trudging in The Grey.
I was pretty wrong, as I usually am with each new culinary adventure, to be worrying about the temperature of the working classroom. Day one's challenges were more so experiment based and far less freezing in the arctic based. In fact, one would argue that my challenges were even less experiment based than simply... vanilla based.
We were able to have creative freedoms on making two different icecreams, a french vanilla icecream with eggs, and then another different flavored icecream. Now, in honor of Chef Jeff who pressed on preaching the importance of Math in Pastry and Baking, we will stop here and complete a word problem together.
Samantha and Mara are making icecream for class. There are 15 students in the class and each student is in a team of 2 with one outlier of 1. 1 icecream machine takes roughly 7 minutes to complete one churn cycle not including clean up time between flavors. If there are only 2 icecream machines and no one in the entire room besides Chef knows what they're doing, how long will it take Samantha and Mara to churn their flavors?
The answer? Pretty, fudging long. Patience in this class seems key. I'm not entirely sold on icecream becoming my focus if only to avoid watching those blades churn round and round and round and round, round, round, round... for eternity. (Approximately 7mins.)
But waiting aside-
The French vanilla went swimmingly. The extra pint of American icecream we made for kicks and giggles was creamy and dreamy. Confidence booming, we attacked the right side of a whiteboard packed with flavor examples all aspiring to one day be churned into icecream. With headstrong attitudes and an over-zealous approach to our first mission, my partner and I said to hell with clean and simple and instead churned up a catastrophe of cream. Like the mad scientist I am grateful I did not become, Samantha and I brought Salted-Caramel Coffee icecream to life.
I was pretty wrong, as I usually am with each new culinary adventure, to be worrying about the temperature of the working classroom. Day one's challenges were more so experiment based and far less freezing in the arctic based. In fact, one would argue that my challenges were even less experiment based than simply... vanilla based.
We were able to have creative freedoms on making two different icecreams, a french vanilla icecream with eggs, and then another different flavored icecream. Now, in honor of Chef Jeff who pressed on preaching the importance of Math in Pastry and Baking, we will stop here and complete a word problem together.
Samantha and Mara are making icecream for class. There are 15 students in the class and each student is in a team of 2 with one outlier of 1. 1 icecream machine takes roughly 7 minutes to complete one churn cycle not including clean up time between flavors. If there are only 2 icecream machines and no one in the entire room besides Chef knows what they're doing, how long will it take Samantha and Mara to churn their flavors?
The answer? Pretty, fudging long. Patience in this class seems key. I'm not entirely sold on icecream becoming my focus if only to avoid watching those blades churn round and round and round and round, round, round, round... for eternity. (Approximately 7mins.)
But waiting aside-
The French vanilla went swimmingly. The extra pint of American icecream we made for kicks and giggles was creamy and dreamy. Confidence booming, we attacked the right side of a whiteboard packed with flavor examples all aspiring to one day be churned into icecream. With headstrong attitudes and an over-zealous approach to our first mission, my partner and I said to hell with clean and simple and instead churned up a catastrophe of cream. Like the mad scientist I am grateful I did not become, Samantha and I brought Salted-Caramel Coffee icecream to life.
![Picture](/uploads/6/2/7/7/62779865/8643160.png?250)
"Something like a recipe. Bits and pieces and... Bits and pieces and... pieces... WEIRD SCIENCE!"
So what did we learn on day 1, class? Let's review.
We learned that Hot and Cold Desserts, although the class has both the love of my life and my frozen foe right in the title, does not take place in an arctic temperate classroom.
We learned that although the Chef puts a million flavors on the white board, a million flavors don't necessarily make a better taste.
And lastly, we learned that cooking icecream to too high of a temperature ruins icecream. Unless, in fact, you are actually looking for scrambled egg flavored cream in which case, I'm not stopping you. It will probably taste better than salted-caramel coffee icecream, anyways.