Take a look here: https://scoopulator.app/calc
I've gotten into the ice cream making hobby recently, but have been frustrated by the lack of ice cream calculators out there. icecreamcalc.com is very comprehensive, but only runs on windows so it's unfortunately useless to me. I've been using some gnarly spreadsheets to try and create balanced recipes, but I figured I may as well make it useful for others as well.
Something else I've noticed is that existing tools/spreadsheets are very technical and difficult to grok if you're new to the hobby. Concepts like PAC and POD take a bit of reading to understand and are a pain to calculate when you introduce a new ingredient. So I was hoping that this site could shorten the learning curve a bit.
Anyway, I'd love to get some feedback and see if anyone else finds it useful!
I'm planning on adding the ability to add ingredients and save recipes so that I can fully replace my old spreadsheets, but I'd love to know:
- Are there any other features that would be helpful?
- Would more ingredient sources be useful? For now I've seeded the database with USDA Foundation Foods and USDA FNDDS, which had the best composition data for calculating PAC/POD (and also helpfully exports their data to JSON).
- Have you found anything horribly wrong? (No doubt there are many errors)
by fucking_biblical
10 Comments
I give it three scoops!
You know what would be a cool feature would be something where you can hold up your phone to a product and have it scan the bar code and figure out, for instance, what percent of cream is in it or whatever.
This is super easy to use and understand. I find it easier than the spreadsheet that floats around as well.
I’m confused about the classification of egg yolks though. Technically, aren’t they considered a stabilizer ? I put 60g of egg yolks into the calculator, and the % of stabilizer was 0.
I have a feeling that the stabilizer category kicks in when I input a powdered stabilizer, like guar gum. But is there a way to capture something like egg yolks ?
I’d potentially like to see other creams. I’m in the UK and our creams have different fat percentages. Commonly we have single, whipping and double. If I remember correctly, single is 19% fat, whipping is 36% with I think some stabilisers, and double cream is 48 to 50 % fat.
These aren’t available in your database because as you say it’s USA stuff there at the moment. (I searched double though and it came up with double cheeseburgers lol)
Maybe a custom milk and cream option where the user inputs the fat content or something.
It looks like you already have fruit in there which is another thing lacking from a lot of the other calculators.
Oh wow, I’ve been hoping to see something like this for a while as the Windows-calculator you mention does nothing but crash on my PC.
Unfortunately I can’t really use it yet if you can’t edit/add ingredients, as we have different percentage of fat etc in our cream and other products.
being able to set the milk and cream percentage would be a helpful improvement
Damn you beat me to this! I’m doing the same thing – building a web based calc and yours is further along. It’s very simple to use!
Nutrition Coordinating Center Food & Nutrition DataBase is generally regarded to be one of the most accurate for nutrition info
Oh I got into ice cream making like 2 weeks ago, this is cool(pun intended)!
First thing I’ve noticed: can we specify egg yolks by count, not by weight?
Love this!!!