Pastry Chef School: Gelato, Froyo, Ice-cream Sandwiches and Semifreddos
This week in pastry school we made a bunch of frozen desserts: gelatos, popsicles, froyos, sherbets, sorbets, semifreddos, ice-cream sandwiches and more.
This week we made a bunch of Semifreddos. Semifreddos are semi-frozen desserts made by combining flavour ingredients with some or all of the following: pate-a-bomb, sabayon, custard, meringues, and whipped cream. We made a bunch of Semifreddos each with it’s own combination of the aforementioned ingredients and additional ingredients (fruit juices, nuts, chocolate, mascarpone, cake, caramel flakes, etc).
When shaping semifreddo there are really two options. The first shaping technique is to assemble them in individual silicon or metal molds, freeze, and use a torch to unmold. The second shaping technique is to line a loaf pan with plastic wrap, assemble the semifreddo in it, freeze, remove plastic wrap and with a sharp clean knife slice off pieces.
This week we made a bunch of Gelatos. A gelato is different from ice cream in that they’re spin in a lower RPM (and as such have less aeration), have less fat, more water (and as such more stabilizer) and aren’t cooked custards.
This Bay Leaf Gelato was great. It’s just milk and cream infused with bay leaf, and some sugar, stabilizer, milk powder and dextrose. We then let the gelato mixtures cool overnight, spin them, let that setup overnight and serve. It tasted great. Bay lead is one of my favourite dessert flavours.
This Baklava Gelato is a great example of a multi-layer gelato. The gelato itself is just milk, cream, sugars, milk powder and stabilizer mixed in with full-fat yogurt. And the chopped baklava is a Lemon-Rose baklava.
How to assemble Baklava Gelato? after spinning the gelato and letting it rest for a bit, put down one 0.5" layer of gelato, cover with chopped baklava, press in with the back of a spoon and repeat.
This Popcorn Gelato is a great example of using infused fats. First, we cook popcorn in a large pot and then without removing the popcorn we made a gelato in the same pot. We later strained out the mixture to remove actual popcorn bits. The popcorn flavour is so strong and beautiful. What’s keeping that flavour there is the infused oils and liquids from the popcorn. We then layered this gelato with chocolate dipped pretzels.
We also made a bunch of other Gelatos. One of the nicest gelatos we made was Figs and Marsala Gelato. We first poach 1:1 ratio dried figs in marsala wine, let that cool, robo coup it to make a “jam”. We then make a gelato and once it’s cooled incorporate the Fig-Marsala Jam with it.
This week we also made a bunch of Sherbets (pronounced: “chef-bat”). Sherbet is halfway between Sorbets (fruit puree + sugar) and ice-cream (sugar + fat). Sherbet tend to be fruit puree based and tend to have milk in them which has some fat but not as much fat as ice cream does. Ice cream ranges from 10–18% fat and sherbets tend to have less. We made a bunch of Sherbets this week:
- Peach-Sweet Tea Sherbet: milk infused with black tea and contains peach puree.
- Avocado-Grapefruit Sherbet: milk infused with grapefruit zest and contains avocado puree.
- Pineapple-Jasmine Sherbet: milk infused with Jasmine tea and contains pineapple puree.
This week we also made Froyo. Froyo is another spun frozen dessert like ice cream, sorbet and sherbet but Froyo contains yogurt. We used full-fat frozen yogurt which provides a good amount of fat. We made a bunch of Froyos this week:
- Straight up Froyo: contained greek yogurt, yogurt, milk and sugar. straight up and spin.
- Key-Lime Froyo: cold infused yogurt with lime zest, and combined with curdled sweetened condensed milk and lime juice.
- Ginger Froyo: contains yogurt, honey and fresh ginger vitamixed puree.
This ice cream sandwich was a dream to eat. We baked off two sheet trays of chocolate cake and froze them. For the bottom part we covered it with Fior di Latte Gelato all the way to the top of the sheet tray and leveled off. We then froze it again and then layered another sheet of frozen chocolate cake on top. Finally we unmolded the sheet trays and sliced off small elongated rectangle shaped portions.
This Baklava Ice cream Sandwich looks and tastes beautiful. It’s similar to the Baklava we made last week but it had 14 layers of buttered-filo on the bottom, a layer of mixture brown sugar, walnuts & cinnamon, and then another 7 layers. We bake the baklava, let it cool completely to room temperature and slice squares.
To assemble the baklava sandwich, remove the top 7 layers, add a scoop of gelato in it and press down the top layer back in.
Confession: I’ve never made Popsicles before. It’s really simple. We just combine everything in a pitcher, pour into popsicle molds, add a popsicle stick, and freeze. Pretty simple.
These coconut popsicles taste great. It’s a combination of coconut milk, condensed milk, milk, cream, salt & vanilla, and toasted shredded coconut. Tastes and looks great. The challenge with these popsicle though is that all the inclusions (e.g. pecans, coconut) tend to float up to the bottom part of the popsicle. To unmold popsicles either let sit in room temp for a bit or in a cold water bath.
We also made a lemon-lime Mile High tart this week. The tart is made from pate-brisee, has a lemon-lime custard baked to 350°F and topped with a brown sugar italian meringue. What’s cool about this tart is how high it is. I had to triple check the recipe but that tart ended up being about 1.5ft tall and it’s mostly brown sugar meringue. Yum.
Read more about my adventures in pastry school by reading about last week’s Ice Creams and Sorbets:
