Dry ice ice cream: looks like a typo, but it's not!

A few weeks ago I got obsessed with the idea of making ice cream using liquid nitrogen.  A couple of places around town are doing it, and the theory is that the faster you freeze the ice cream base, the less time the ice crystals have to form, so you get very small ice crystals and hence a super-smooth ice cream.  Jill and I checked out the process at The Crushery on South Pearl, and it's true, their ice cream was extremely smooth (and extremely cold--you could pick up flakes of it and it wouldn't melt).  However, when I did some research on how to acquire liquid nitrogen, I found several stories of terrible liquid nitrogen accidents, including some in kitchens (since it's stored in pressurized tanks, if something goes wrong the tank can easily fly through your wall).  So then I thought about using dry ice, which is not nearly as cold, and doesn't have to be stored under pressure.  

Dry ice, which is solid carbon dioxide, is pretty easy to buy, and does chill liquids very quickly (and with a satisfying cloud of "smoke").  However, it also carbonates the liquid, which we discovered when I made my first batch of dry ice ice cream using coffee ice cream base.  Carbonated coffee is not good.  So then we brainstormed some ice cream flavors that carbonation would actually enhance, and we came up with a good list: champagne, root beer, real beer.  We have a milk stout on our beer list, so we decided to work with that, and after a few experiments, we figured out how to make milk stout ice cream right at your table: 

First we combine the dairy and the beer in a bowl.

Then we add the dry ice and stir for about one minute.

The finished ice cream is served with a ginger spice cake (also made with stout)!

Our servers, who actually have to do all the work here, have been good sports about this crazy dish, and it certainly is impressive to watch!

The birth of Börk, and a squash invasion

We've had an exciting week at Generous Servings!  First, we have welcomed a new life into our happy family: I am please to introduce you to Börk, who weighed 2 ounces on Monday and is growing rapidly:

I decided that it was time to start a sourdough culture.  It's a big decision, but after I taught a super-fun Breads class on Sunday, I knew it was the right time for me.  I've toyed with the idea of having a yeast starter for many years--it does, after all, combine my two greatest interests, microbiology and food--but whenever I would look up instructions for how to do it, I would always get annoyed at the imprecision and often completely ridiculous explanations of the "science" behind it.  I have found that most people's understanding of these old "homesteading" techniques is firmly stuck in the 1800s.  This was the case back when we were trying to optimize our butter-making procedure, and it's even worse for anything involving microbes.  If I still worked in my old lab at Stanford, it would take literally $50 and two easy days of work to figure out exactly what is in ten different sourdough cultures, but apparently no one has ever done this for a sourdough starter.  I realize that you probably can't get a grant for this, but you don't need a grant.  We wasted $50 on useless experiments about once an hour in my old lab, and having a good idea of what's going on in a starter wouldn't be useless at all.  There are a lot of people out there trying to figure out why their starter died, or didn't do what they wanted, and they have nothing to go on.  Alas, I didn't think of this idea when I had the chance.

Anyway, I did as much research on starters as I could, and then I decided it was time to wade in.  So I mixed up some whole wheat flour and orange juice (based on the best web info I could find, at this site), and we named our starter Börk, after the last three words in the Muppet Swedish Chef's classic song.

Now we wait and see what happens!  If all goes well, in a few weeks we can try making bread using Börk.  If she dies, or gets overcome by mold or foul-smelling bacteria, we'll try again.

Yesterday was Squash Day!  It turns out that if you ask people at the end of the summer to donate squash, this is what you get (Jill is in this picture for scale; also note the weird curved squash on the far left):

We forgot to weigh the squash before we got started, but I think it was about 200 pounds.  Four of us hacked away at it for several hours:

Until we reduced it to many, many pans of roasted squash:

This is the kind of job that makes you think you will never eat squash again.  But I'm sure by the time we thaw this out in January to use in our next Cook for a Cause, I'll be all excited about a great recipe we're going to make to use it all up.