From February 5, 2014
Steve Thompson
Emery Thompson 12NW 12-Quart Batch Freezer
[Music] so we’re going to start with the chocolate um I use uh Forbes chocolate Benjamin P Forbes is a company out in I believe they’re in Cleveland area and American company and uh they make several different cocoa powders ready to use you just pour them uh right into the machine or pour them into your mix first and Stir It Up which is what I’m going to do and right in the machine ready to go so we’re going to make a New York favorite you don’t see this in much of the rest of the country we’re going to make chocolate Italian what we grew up on in you always grew up on either Lemon Cherry or chocolate was it now they have watermelon and Bubblegum and oh yeah and M mango papaya kiwi all all sorts of great flavors in New York it was Lemon Cherry grape orange and chocolate could I have um three quart three quarts of water yes sir thanks I’ll work for you when it’s your I’ll work for you when we’ve got uh this is my water and my uh this is over here whoops sorry uh now I’m going to use besides the cocoa powder I’m going to use agabi and like I said I may not be the greatest ice cream maker in the world I like to experiment so we’re going to play with some different things today I have made Agave uh Italian ice before Agave let’s see I need this uh instead of using cane sugar the Agave is uh made from um Cactus and it’s the same product that you use uh for making tequila if you if you had a still uh if you buy this in the health food store very expensive if you talk to your supermarket and say I need a case of agave they can get it for you for about a third of the price it’s sweeter than uh sugar so we’re going to use less of it but the real Beauty you might see this little thing on my side here I’m a diabetic insulin dependent and on a scale of 100 with 100 being the worst sugar is at 96 Sugar’s real bad for me Agave comes in down at 23 so if I’m going to break ranks and E something I shouldn’t eat like this product uh made with the Agave is going to be better for me than not also it sounds nice in your menu if you’re if you’re doing a push cart you’re going to use sugar and people are going to love the product if you have a a trendy store uh in uh Palm Beach Florida you know maybe you want to use the Agave just because it’s great advertising so I’m going to pour in my agave and let’s see the recipe calls for 2 lounds of agave maybe I’ll even measure this and see what it weighs so got a great any Italian ice recipe U you can make you can convert to what is called in different parts of the country cream ice or sorbet same product and uh a friend of mine owns a cream ice store in South Florida and it’s wildly popular lines out the door he doesn’t sell ice cream just cream I it’s a marvelous product and you can make that simply there’s a formula for it which I know and it simply means adding some uh cream or or ice cream mix to this formula not a lot and that’s why this is so very profitable Italian ice is extremely profitable cost you 2 cents and it sells for $25 it’s just ridiculously profitable and cream ice is also profitable just a hair less but it’s a great product I need to taste this to see if it’s going to work um here tpoon okay what kind of water you using here excuse me how much water did you use I used 3 quarts of water and and one container of that Forge chop with well you know I hate to say this but it doesn’t matter because you’ll make it the way you think it tastes great uh he doesn’t really know much about ice cream so he makes it the way he thinks it tastes great I what I know is Machinery right and that’s why Jeff’s here so when you’re make when you’re formulating a recipe uh you’ll do what he just did you’ll taste it and then you’ll begin to understand that when it’s done it tastes just a little different from now but you’ll get the hang of that my ice cream is all very bold very sweet ice cream I like it that way so that’s the only thing I can make you can only make what you like if you try to make something that is not what you think is great then it’s not going to work so how much he’s adding to me it’s irrelevant because you’re going to add different amount I would add a different amount now Steve you’re making water ice that way I’m making water ice yes now I can tell this gentleman’s from Philadelphia because he called it Water Ice in New York we call it Italian ice in Philadelphia they call it Water Ice uh down in Birmingham Alabama it’s called Greek ice because six Greek Brothers left New York Brooklyn moved to Birmingham and they said why should we call it Italian we’re not Italian so they call it Greek Ice uh bubb’s in Hawaii uh calls it Hawaiian ice so it has all sorts of different names I think this will work we’ll give it a try you were going to make that a PR much how I don’t know if I could tell him that should I tell him that of course we have to put duct tape over his mouth about a half a court once again it’s going to depend on how much you’re making uh I I usually don’t make this small an amount so I have re and I guess it’s in my book which I’ll check in a minute uh the proportion for what’s this a 20 qu uh this is a 10 quart 10 quart 12 qu I use a 24 quart so my proportions will be a little different uh but I’ll get that information for you I’m question the question was how much Dairy mix to add to Italian IES to make cream ice or s if I was making a cream ice in a 24q machine it would be about 1 and 1/2 quarts of the dairy mix and that works well it makes it a very smooth product let me show you what I’m doing here uh our machines come with the infinite overrun control and uh this allows me to vary the speed so with one machine I can make uh Frozen Custard I can make gelato these are very heavy products I can make hogendas and Ben and& Jerry two companies we put into business which is a super heavy ice cream we can make uh I got all over well that’s a good start we can make um uh a premium ice cream by raising the air content but when it comes to sorbet and Italian Isis they don’t take on uh about a tiny bit of air because there’s no dairy in it so we’re going to ramp this up to full speed just which is what uh 234 revolutions per minute and then we’re going to turn on the refrigeration now I’m going to set my $5 timer for an approximate amount of time and we’ll see what happens now um when it comes to the timer and other gadgets I don’t put gadgets on my machine because gadgets are things that break the infinite overrun control is something that we designed uh I invented it now coming up on 12 years ago and it’s a on these machines it’s standard on the bigger machines it’s an option but 95% of the machines leave leaving here have it uh the reason you want it is because we don’t know 5 years from now what the latest fat is going to be and how you’re going to run it and at least you’ll have a machine that can do any speed that ever comes along uh example we do hard frozen yogurt you’ve seen all the frozen yogurt stores they’re everywhere and most of them are going out of business because they’re really Bland they’re just uh peach flavored uh yogurt or their uh lemon flavored yogurt uh with a batch freezer we can put all the ingredients right in here nuts cookies candies the works so when I make um uh say fresh peach um Frozen Yogurt my peaches go right in here so I I get a much better product but we want to run that at a lower speed now in the past you couldn’t do that but now with the infinite overrun we can take it down we can slow this down to any speed we want so if I was doing frozen yogurt I would take that all the way down to about 150 revolutions per minute and there’s a chart at my uh website that shows you all the different speeds they’re just like Jeff was saying about the recipes uh when I make recipes they’re an approximation of uh what you’re trying to do but what Jeff does and what he did years ago is when he was experimenting with different flavors he tried a little this he tried a little that when he finally got the way he liked it he wrote it down on a 3×5 file card and said that’s it this is the way you make it because we want consistency in the frozen dessert business we want just like McDonald’s I mean I think McDonald’s is a lousy hamburger but it’s the same lousy hamburger in Moscow as it is in Miami as it is in uh uh San Francisco when you walk into a McDonalds you know what you’re going to get and if I only visit Jeff store say once every 3 years when I come to Florida to visit say on vacation and I love his mint chip ice cream I want it just the way I remember it the way it’s embedded in in my mind how good it tasted so that recipe cannot change unless Jeff decides himself that he’s going to change it I’m a New Yorker so I take it a little bit further if uh you have an employee because you really should teach someone else how to make the ice cream what if you get the flu you have someone else making the ice cream and they look at the recipe and they say ah Steve’s a jerk he doesn’t know how to make mint chip and needs more mint and he changes my formula well if we find that out you know we’re going to shoot his kneecaps out take him out to the street and then we’re going to f him because I can’t afford to have my recipe changed now on the other hand if the guy goes and drops a metal spoon in the machine and he stops the machine don’t worry about it it’s only a machine emry Thompson will fix it up for you uh we don’t worry about machinery would worry about the recipes have you ever changed the recipe that you’ve had well interesting that you mentioned that can you hear him okay Ken okay there’s a re I have my my recipes on file cards which I recommend you do and I recommend you laminate them that being said every time you make ice cream what I do is I right about now I would stick a spoon in there and try it and sometimes you got to add or or dilute something because it just doesn’t taste the same and that’s why only you can determine the flavor you’re going to make now why is it different it may be different because the last batch you made was vanilla and there might have been a little vanilla left in the machine if you didn’t rinse it out because you can go from vanilla to Chocolate so it might have changed the flavor a little bit it’s a complex issue but there’s two things involved there’s the science of making ice cream which is what you determine as your formula this amount of mix this amount of vanilla this amount of whatever else you’re using and then there’s the art of ice cream which is half of the process and the Art of ice cream will will tell you little more sweetener little less mix little little little and that’s what you’ll have to do uh many times I make uh eight gallons at once that’s what mine puts out and I wind up uh throwing it away it’s just not what I wanted and there are many things that contribute to that but that’s the art of ice cream the science is pretty consistent uh right x amount of mix x amount of sweetener X amount of flavor uh and that’s pretty consistent and that’s what’s on these 100 cards that I have at my store but in training somebody I tell that person right about now stick a spoon in and taste it make sure it’s exactly what you want nine times out of 10 it’ll be real close close enough where you won’t have to change anything but there are times when you will have to change it I get people who um does that make any sense it makes perfect sense I get people who want to buy the small machine or even the little uh threeq uh because they’re going to go home and they’re going to experiment well uh you know bless you it’s great I sell more machines but the fact is you don’t really need to spend months experimenting because there are there is some bit of mathematics involved in ice cream especially in Italian ice talking about uh a bigger machine than this a 24 Court uh my recipe for a New York lemon ice is going to be 7 lb of sugar 14 quarts of water and 2 quart of lemon juice what’s key there is the sugar to water ratio that’s going to determine will it freeze in the machine and how smooth it will be now that’s a New York ice I go down the road to Philadelphia where they call it the lemon water ice and they like their ice smoother than New York so the 7 lb of sugar goes up to 8 lb the extra sugar makes it smoother I go out to bay8 Street in Brooklyn which is an all Italian neighborhood everybody’s only speaking Italian and they like a product called granita or granite and granita is a very coarse Italian ice it’s almost uh crunchy and that drops from the New York 7 pounds of sugar down to five or six uh the less sugar the more coarse it is so if you call up and say I want a smooth ice I’m going to give you a Philadelphia formula if you want it smoother we’re going to make it a cream Ice by adding some uh Dairy to it so that’s going to stay the constant is your sugar water ratio and then the flavor then becomes the objective it becomes to taste are you going to use fresh squeezed lemons which if you’re an Italian neighborhood you better use fresh lemon juice or are you in debuk Iowa no offense to debuk but you know when like Florida when I moved to Central Florida hell Pizza they didn’t even know what an Italian was and um so I could get away with using a a lemon extract not a very good product but for the market it was okay at the time yeah you’re never wrong using the very very best so I use fresh lemon juice but it’s the sugar water ratio that’s going to determine if it works if it’s going to freeze I started off with the most messy product didn’t I I should have made this at the end of the day absolutely but I wanted him to see well I wanted him to see a real New York product normally you start with the lighter color less flavorful items in your daily run yeah vanilla is a good way to start um and then you end with chocolate for two reasons uh the main reason being that uh cleaning out the machine after chocolate is is more involved than cleaning it out after anything else and peanut butter forget about it peanut butter is the wor peanut butter you hire someone you don’t like to make it for you because peanut butter gets everywhere question but you actually do a rinse of ma the question is between batches do you do a rinse well you try not to just because you’re trying to save time there would be nothing wrong with it but if I was making different Italian Isis I would make lemon first it’s white then I would make make orange Italian ice it’s in the lemon family but sweeter and then I would probably go to uh Cherry which is going to be red then I’m going to do grape which is going to be a darker red and then a black raspberry which is even a darker red and then I would probably throw in a couple of quarts of water lead slash around for 30 seconds rinse that out and then make my chocolate ice and that’s why sorry no go ahead and that’s why they’ll taste a little different if he makes black cherry after making strawberry it’s going to to change the black cherry a little bit uh so you have to taste it that’s the art of the ises uh you shouldn’t stray too far because like Steve said people come in expecting a certain product from you and they want consistency but in my store I make 35 flavors and they’re fresh every day uh and 35 flavors to clean the machine I make say eight at a time eight flavors at a time uh or in one run and if if I’m going to clean the machine between every uh flavor that’s going to be a long process so I try to minimize that when I run my boot camp I don’t care because you do it that’s a joke Jeff I’m ready um what I did here is I have my timer which I just again I normally I would set it for a more exacting time but I’m just checking the product when I watch bake uh a cake uh she sets the oven for maybe 25 minutes and then she doesn’t pull the cake out of the oven she goes over with a knife and and checks it to see if it sticks it might need another 2 minutes or it might be ready what I’m doing is I’m just opening and closing it and if it cuts off sharp Like a Knife went through it it’s ready so we’re just going to open this up look how fast that comes out and that’s another thing Steve uh extracts his ice cream sooner than I do uh just the way I like it so you’ll do it at a different time there’s no exact time to do it there’s no wrong time well there is a wrong time if you let it go too long it’s a waste you throw it away because it’s too it’s too hard in ice cream it’s too buttery or if it’s too too thin too thin no good either you’ll get watery ice cream so there is a right and a wrong time to do it and that comes with practice not too hard to learn though and that’s it now look at the color look at that beautiful product look and look how thick that is is’t that gorgeous that’s ready to go and that cost me probably a penny and a half an ounce uh so a 4 oz portion is costing me uh 6 cents 6 cents and uh I’m going to sell that for easily $150 uh so why don’t you come on up and give that a try don’t be afraid I’ll try first make sure it doesn’t kill you make sure spoons are right over there that’s [Music] good Sammy come here girl [Music] woo go