It all started at Christmas 2017, with a homemade ice cream that within days was a block of ice. Out of that came a professional ice cream book, a spreadsheet, a compressor machine and, in the end, this website.
01 · The beginningIt all started trying to make a better ice cream
For you to know where all this comes from, we have to go back to Christmas 2017. Since I love cooking, I thought I'd make a good dessert, went digging around the internet and found a pumpkin ice cream with pistachio sponge. At that point I had never tried making ice cream at home, and I decided to go for it.
I remember the recipe said you could make it without a machine: you just had to take the ice cream out every half hour and blitz it with a stick blender, I don't know how many times. I have a fairly tedious memory of taking that «supposed homemade ice cream» in and out.
For the sponge I took another, more sophisticated recipe and made it with a siphon, which I'd never tried either — and that one did turn out very good.
I don't remember the ice cream recipe well, but I have a feeling it had an enormous quantity of egg yolks, ordinary sugar (sucrose) and, I think, gelatine.
The moment came to try the dessert, and as for the ice cream, on the day I made it, it passed; but the next day, and as the days went by, it turned into a genuine block of ice.
02 · The turning pointThe book that changed everything
It had little to do with the creamy ice cream I was expecting. I was thoroughly let down, and being very proud and liking to do things properly, I set about finding out why it had happened. After trawling through thousands of dreadful pages, I decided to look for a professional book, until I came across this one.
It's called Los secretos del helado, it's by Angelo Corvitto, and it's the one that marks the border between following recipes and understanding why they work.
03 · Taking it seriouslyFrom making recipes to starting to understand them
I only had to start reading that book for a new world to open up: it combined a good many ingredients to reach the values and balance wanted — it was pure formulation, and being a software person it hit me exactly in the right spot. I devoured the book in a few days. On the back of that I began building an Excel sheet to do all the calculations and bought myself a compressor machine.
Within days I was formulating my own ice creams, and it was thrilling to be able to take any ingredient, try to fit it into the formula and see what might happen. After this book came many others, and it hasn't stopped since.
04 · The problemWhat's out there on the internet
I like analysing different corners of the internet to see what's taken and what isn't, so I kept digging around the web, searching for «homemade ice cream» to see what I'd find. Every site I visited was worse than the last: people put in random ingredients with no coherence and no calculation. The ones that amuse me most are those who put half a litre of cream in a litre of ice cream and don't bat an eyelid — never mind the ones who throw in whole eggs, ordinary sugar with no anti-freezing sugars alongside it, and so on.
An ice cream, if it's well formulated, can be considered a very nutritious food; put in half a litre of cream and it becomes the fattiest food in the world. Someone who knows nothing about it — as happened to me the first time — takes the first recipe they see, makes it and finds the result isn't what they hoped for, and on top of that they're eating an ice cream full of fat. The fat in a well-formulated ice cream is usually between 4% and 12%, with 8% the best figure for a custard-style ice cream.
Do you know what percentage one of these ice creams you find on any website can reach? Over 20% fat, sheer madness.
An ice cream isn't a list of ingredients: it's a formula. Once you understand what each one does, you stop copying recipes and start deciding.
05 · The projectAnd from that came Haztuhelado
Because of all this, I decided to build a website and share with you the knowledge I've gathered over these years.
I hope you learn a great deal and end up making your own homemade ice cream recipes, properly balanced.
