A decent starter book for your first ice cream machine...

books:


	• The Ultimate Ice Cream Book: Over 500 Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, Drinks, And More Bruce Weinstein William Morrow Cookbooks, 1999 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 80 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Ice Cream Encyclopedia

This book has the widest selection of good standard recipes, as well as new imaginative ones, including frozen yogurt. I highly recommend it.

A decent starter book for your first ice cream machine...

The self-proclaimed "Ultimate Ice Cream Book" is stated to contain over 500 recipes for ice cream, sherbert, sorbet, granita, drinks and more, but this number is extremely misleading; there are really several basic bases (chocolate, vanilla, various fruits) with extensive lists of flavor variations.

As other reviewers have pointed out, it feels like the book was largely padded by large sections of cut-and-paste text; each recipe repeats the same basic instructions ad nauseam, and the simple line-drawing graphics repeat themselves as well. Many of the "flavor variations" overlap with other recipes: for example, there is a cherry chocolate nut listed under Philadelphia-style cherry ice cream, and separate entries for chocolate cherry ice cream and chocolate cherry cordial ice cream, a cherry chocolate malt, etc. that are simply variations of the same basic recipe. For example, the marmalade ice cream recipe lists seven variations, all of which contain "use (fruit) jam and (fruit)liqueur or (fruit) syrup. Is that really worth its own page?

Most of the ice creams are French, or custard, style and contain eggs, although there are several Philadelphia-style ice creams that rely on cream and sugar, not eggs, though they are less rich. If you were hoping for gelato, you'll have to look elsewhere. Dolce Italiano: Desserts from the Babbo Kitchen has an entire chapter devoted to gelato, sorbetto and semifreddo.

Also, some of the flavor combinations verged on the improbable side for my taste buds: butter fruitcake? Corn? Cashew and red pepper? Chestnut and candied fruit? Cinnamon basil? Hmm. These aren't something I'd make on a regular basis. However, other variations such as cinnamon harvest (cinnamon ice cream with granola, raisins, and nutmeg), mango ginger, and rum raisin sounded promising.

The selection of sorbets and granitas included unusual veggie ideas such as beet, carrot, cucumber, and tomato that would make a perfect first course on a hot summer's day. Also included are suggested toppings (various nut and fudge sauces) and making your own cones and meringue shells.

I had to wonder if some of the recipes were actually tested; for example, the Irish ice cream recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups Irish cream, along with 1/2 cup Amaretto in one of the variations. Given, you're reducing the liqueur to aboout 3/4 cup, but alcohol tampers with the freezing point of ice cream and will affect the way your ice cream hardens (or not). Other recipes called for crumbled toasted waffles and crumbled baked pie crust -- wouldn't that turn into a soggy mass at some point? And as others have mentioned, Weinstein uses flour, cornstarch and corn syrup as stabilizers/thickeners in many recipes. Ick. If I wanted unnecessary ingredients, I'd just buy store-bought. Propylene Glycol Monostearate and carrageenan, anyone?

But overall, this is a good basic starting point if you're brand-new to ice cream making. You can also find numerous free recipes online at sites like Allrecipes (user-rated recipes). Final verdict: worth a look, but feels overpriced. Be sure to check out Williams-Sonoma Collection: Ice Cream (Williams-Sonoma Collection (New York, N.Y.).), Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book and Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments to round out your collection.

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the ultimate ice cream book

Enjoyed this book well worth having in your kitchen.It covered so much more then just making ice cream.Lots of fun testing new recipes and the variations. THANKS

Kindle version specific review...

I think others have covered the content well, it's basically a gigantic book of delicious recipies, common and not so common, that will give you a lot of ideas to use with your ice cream maker. The aim of my review is to add some info specifically for those Kindle users out there.

The problem with the Kindle version is the table of contents is limited to the very high level chapter headings. So you can easily go right to the main chapters: Ice Cream Cones, Ice Cream, Sorbet, etc. but not to a particular recipe like Vanilla Ice Cream. Doing a search on Vanilla Ice Cream brings back 86 results, 15 pages on the Knidle, so that's not super efficient. A search on the word Vanilla brings back 244 results since vanilla is used in so many recipes. It's a little better for less common flavors, coffee ice cream, for example, only returns 37 results. There is a "Searchable Terms" chapter but unfortunately the terms listed are not links, just an unclickable list of terms. So while it's not totally unusable on a Kindle a little work on the table of contents or index would make a huge improvement.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Ice cream lover's, The Ultimate Ice Cream Book is the last cookbook you'll ever need. Learn how to make over 500 ice creams, sorbets, gelatos, granitas and drinks with this well-researched and well-tested recipe book.

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