Flaming Sorbet
Specialty Equipment: fine digital scale, PacoJet, vacuum machine, water bath
Specialty Ingredients: spray-dried apple granules, malic acid, gellan F, vitamin C, fructose, dry ice, popping candy
Days: 1
Dish as in The Fat Duck:
——————————————————————————————————————————————-
The most advanced sorbet dishTM. Just look at the list of ingredients and equipment. Spray-dried apple granules, gellan F, PacoJet, dry ice… A definitive wolf in sheep’s clothing. I had a difficult time acquiring a sane amount (read ‘not wholesale’) of dry ice and felt like leaving it out, but my Fat Duck insanity started to kick in. ‘No way I’m leaving the stuff out.’ In the end I found a courier service in Amsterdam, who delivers dry ice for the company Icebitzzz and had a doable minimal purchase amount of 3kg.
These were all the boxes of the postmodern pantry required for the dish. The key ingredient is gellan F, which stops the sorbet from melting when setting it on fire. In essence the sorbet is a frozen fluid gel. It is made from spray-dried apple granules, malic acid, apple juice and water.
I had some issues with the thickness of the gel. With the Cox’s Apple recipe I first got the feeling my apple granules differ from the ones used in the Fat Duck and this recipe confirmed it. My apple mixture was very thick, even before it was turned in a fluid gel with gellan F. It was so thick there was no way it would be a pleasant texture for a sorbet, more brick material. I rewatched the Christmas special from In Search of Perfection, which features the flaming sorbet, and saw that the apple granules and water mixture in the video is much thinner than mine. I added more apple juice to the sorbet base until it was pourable and not stiff as glue.
My second deviation was the freezing method. I used an ice cream machine instead of a PacoJet. Contrary to my expectations it worked fine, resulting in a smooth sorbet.
The sorbet sits on a bed of caramelized apples, sultanas, dices of raw apple and a crumble. For the bottom layer of the base you have to poach apples for 12 hours at 90˚C in a sugar mix of fructose and apple juice. When done you have to bake them for caramelization and to drive off some moisture.
Sultanas soaking in the apple poaching liquid.
During the crumble preparations I knew the cookbook had gotten to me. I’m at a point of no return. Precision is imprinted in my brain. My fingers act like somebody could strike them at any time with a whip if I’m not precise. I was cutting cubes of butter for the crumble and noticed I was cutting them all in the same size and discarding the ones that weren’t. It’s only a freaking butter for a crumble mixture! In the end I got some control of myself and kept the ‘deformed’ cubes and chopped the rest of the butter with a slightly less rigorous regiment.
The rest of the crumble mixture consists of chopped hazelnuts, flour, demerara sugar, cinnamon and salt. A straightforward preparation.
Vitamin C and fructose combined with water is used for the diced raw apple, to stop them from discoloring and give them a little flavor injection.
Duiker. The courier service of, among others, dry ice. I went with my brother to the corners of Amsterdam, deep into the ports of Amsterdam, all for dry ice. A surreal experience. Just look at the storage space of the company. ‘Excuse me I’d like some dry ice for a food preparation.’ ‘What?’
The dry ice came packed in Styrofoam. A couple of days later I can say it is not the best storage material for dry ice, cause a lot of it sublimated. From what I have read dry ice can be stored for some time with minimal loss, but I could be wrong.
A little warm water and dry ice equals fairytale smoke.
To substitute for the custom made perfume of leather, wood, fire, tobacco and whiskey used at the Fat Duck I mixed oak extract, leather essence, smoke powder (from SOSA) and regular whiskey. I was pretty chuffed with my concoction.
To finish I build the base for the sorbet, scooped a rocher of sorbet, chopped some dry ice in small pieces, warmed a cast iron lid (from a small stew pot) and arranged some liqourice roots on the plate supporting the lid.
This is an incredible fun dish. When you pour hot water on the dry ice and popping candy the table is covered with aroma filled vapor and the sound of crackling. Definitely something to make for friends or family and wake them up good. The sorbet and base pack a punch, releasing a hit of apple, helped by the malic acid in the sorbet. You could easily leave out the whole ‘setting a sorbet on fire’ part and leave the drama to the dry ice. (or of course set the sorbet on fire and leave out the dry ice). If I could just find even smaller quantities of dry ice and closer to me I would definitely make this dish or something similar on a regular basis. Top notch.
and the photos are getting better too 😉
Hehe, thanks.
Well done! How long did it burn for? Did any of the sorbet melt at all, or did it stay intact until the booze burned off?
He Lee. It burned for quite some time, maybe 15 seconds. I must say I used more whiskey than instructed in the recipe to let it burn, burn, burn.
No melting at all. It gets softer and warmer at the edges, while the centre stays cool. The sorbet is a fluid gel and you can heat it to about 80˚C before it looses it cohesion. So with a frozen fluid gel you have a lot of latitude before you have to worry about it ‘falling apart’.
Any plans on making this dish?
Thanks for the info. I wouldn’t mind trying this one, although I may leave out the dry ice for the moment! I have Gellan from the Texturas range of chemicals. Do you know if this is Gellan “F”, or would I need to get something else?
Yeah, it is gellan F.
Damn this is cool. So many things to do. Can you talk about the tate of the sorbet? Did the apple flavor come through really well?
The sorbet was packed full of apple flavor. I gave it to others and they said it was just like biting into the most delicious apple.
The base of the dish rounds the dish off, with different apple textures and flavors.
Stumbled over your blog today, and thumbs up for it! Awesome work you put into this and the results look really good.
The pacojet isn’t for us mere mortal amateurs, so it’s great to hear that the texture turned out well on an icecream machine. Another way of freezing it could have put some of all that excess dry ice you had into use. It’s minus 78 degrees if I remember correctly, and you can use it in a similar way to liquid nitrogen. Smash it into small pieces, have the icecream mix in a mixer and pour the dry ice into it little by little. It should freeze the icecream in ~5 mins, and make for very small crystals. Perhaps worth considering if you ever go down this road again.
A side not might be that you can actually make a sorbet fizzy this way aswell, if you want to.
PacoJet, ‘not for us mere mortal amateurs’, haha.
Christian, I completely forgot about using the dry ice for the apple ice cream, that would have been a good solution to the absence of divine equipment. I did make my go to ice cream, vanilla, with it though.
But that was basically it. All the rest I used up by pouring hot water over it and get exited like a little boy by the vapor.
For a 30-minute cooking competition I’ve been looking into liquid nitrogen (and later dry ice) as well – I figured making ice cream in such a short amount of time could only be done with extreme cold. I actually found a supplier for liquid nitrogen and dry ice here in the UK- Liquid nitro for occasional use is prohibitively expensive (over a hundred pounds including delivery, cannister rental etc). Dry ice is much more affordable, but sublimation would be a problem as the cook-offs were in the weekend.
I didn’t end up making ice cream, but there’s an alternative way of getting dry ice: make your own. Searching online, I found that emptying a CO2 fire extinguisher into a pillow case should do the trick. As the gas decompresses, it cools down to the point where dry ice is formed. Also, it shouldn’t be hard to find places that are willing to refill your extinguisher. An added benefit is that CO2 inside a fire extinguisher conserves better than dry ice pellets- you can just have it sit on the shelf alongside your other herbs and spices. And for use at a cooking contests, it would add a dramatic touch compared to “just” using dry ice pellets 😉
…Just noticed that fire extinguishers are a lot more pricy in the Netherlands than here in the UK. But as CO2 is used for many other purposes, it should be easy to find less regulated sources of compressed CO2. Your local pub would be a good starting point to find it.
He Marc, do you know if the fire extinguisher act the same as the CO2 chargers for whipping cream cannisters/siphons? Those thing get extremely cold when you empty them out.
BTW, is the whole fire extinguisher a trick so I’ll try it and test it out for you, hehe. See if I’ll survive. 😉
I haven’t actually tried it out. Good chance I will, at some point. Of course I’ll let you know how it went then. Meanwhile, to keep you entertained- some people already did this, for example:
http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2006-08/dry-ice-cream
Very tempting to get onto eBay and spend the 30 pounds and give it a go 🙂
I’ve still got another experiment up first though. It involves calcium chloride (which I’ve got) and sodium alginate (which I haven’t got yet…)
Make sure you check the fire extinguisher when you buy it, since not all are with CO2. There are basicly 3 types. Waterbased, powderbased which mostly use something similar to bakingpowder and then the CO2 based. So it would suck to buy one and blow you icecream full of baking powder ;).
Another note to the CO2 ones are that the way they work are by cooling, which could make them usefull for the icecream making. The other way they work needs to be considered though, since they actually work by suffocating the fire, by depriving it of oxygen since the CO2 will force it away from the fire. This is also why most of them have warnings regarding indoor use, since you actually risk passing out from lack of oxygen when using them in closed spaces. So just be sure to think about it if you try it out, and you might want to keep the windows open for good circulation.
He Marc en Christian, I get the feeling I’m being pushed into trying a fire extinguisher for ice cream, hehe. I must say the idea of a fire extinguisher, even after cooking lots of stuff from tha book, seems crazy as hell. So, I like it!
Isn’t any of you prepared to give it a go first?
Yikes! I had a look at what they cost here in Denmark, and they cost upwards to 200 euro! So for that reason alone this is atleast a nogo for me to try that, or it will be the most insanely overpriced icecream I’ve ever made, hehe. So I think I will stick with the good old regular dry ice, I bet even liquid nitrogen is a cheaper alternative to an fire extinguisher.
HELP PLEASE!!! I have tried to do the flaming sorbet. Is it me, or as soon as you start cooling the stuff before placing it in the ice cream machine, it starts to gel almost immediately? Please some insight on this. I would truly truly appreciate it.
It is a gel made with gellan F, so it will clump up. Just break it up with a blender while it cools, like the recipe instructs. Good luck.
If anyone who doesn’t have the book fancies a try at this then this website got permission to reproduce the recipe:
http://www.caterersearch.com/Articles/06/11/2008/324485/interview-with-michelin-starred-heston-blumenthal-on-the-big-fat-duck-cookbook.htm
I finally did this last night:
My notes:
1) The crumble browns VERY quickly. Keep an eye on it. I ended up burning mine slightly which really affected the taste
2) Mine wasn’t flaming! The problem was that I didn’t have a cast iron cocotte so I used ramekins instead. I put the stewed apple and sultanas in them and then popped them in the oven for a while. When I put them on the plate with the dry ice they cooled down really quickly and thus the alcohol in the whiskey didn’t evaporate and there was nothing to catch fire. To be honest you’re probably better off leaving out the dry ice as (1) it’s expensive, and (2) you might have the same problem as me. If you do use it then put it around rather than under the cocotte to stop it chilling the dish and use hot water rather than warm
3) I didn’t use twigs :-\ in the end I couldn’t be bothered to cut up a twig from my tree to do it, but it would have looked a lot better so I would recommend doing it
4) As mentioned before, if you’re using the MSK apple powder then instead of using 200g powder add an extra 80g water and use 120g powder, or 100g water and 100g powder. It comes out fine then.
A couple of questions:
1. where did you get the gellan (I live in NL, and since I saw you’re from Amsterdam, I assume that I might be able to get it from the same place as you)
2. how much gellan do you use
3. do you think this method (with the gellan) could work for other types of ice cream, you want to set on fire?
Hi. I’m curious, how many does this recipe serve? It looks like 6. Is that right? Thanks.
Don’t really remember. Looking back I think you’re right with 6 for the sorbet. The rest of the stuff will probably serve more than 6.
This blog about 44. Flaming Sorbet | The Big Fat
Undertaking has helped me a lot, is very well written. I used this fat burner product: https://s96.me/fit and I reached the ideal weight.
Kiss you All!