Textbook rant

During the first week of school, one of the chefs said "these are twenty-one thousand dollar books, so take care of them." The $21k referring to the tuiton.

I don't think so. The books have a few problems.

Problem 1: Sometimes a recipe will have an ingredient on the ingredient list, but the directions for the recipe don't say where to add it. It's usually a less significant ingredient like vanilla or salt, but still, wtf? Leaving out the salt or vanilla in a dish can make a big difference in flavor.

Several times I've made the mistake of actually trying to make something by following the recipe in the book. When I'm finished, I'll look on the table and see a little container of salt or half a vanilla bean and be like "fuck, the recipe never said anything about that."

Problem 2: Sometimes the directions are so vague as to render the recipe almost useless without seeing the chefs' demonstration first.

Problem 3: The directions for a few recipes say "make a creme anglaise with the first 4 ingredients." I know how to make a creme anglaise and it's pretty easy, but there's no recipe for creme anglaise in the book. Did they decide to leave it out just because it's so easy? If so, why is there a recipe for simple syrup? Creme anglaise is one of the most basic pastry recipes, I kinda think it should be there at least as a reference.

Problem 4: The ice cream and sorbet balancing formulas are flawed. The formulas make 3 incorrect assumptions.

The first is that all the solid content of fruit is sugar. Fruit contains fiber, vitamins, minerals, fats, and proteins, all of which are solid. For example, bananas (according to the USDA) are 25% solid, but only 12.2% sugar.

The second is that all the sugar in fruit is fructose. This is very wrong. Again using bananas for example, fructose is slightly less than 40% of the total sugar. There's actually more glucose than fructose in a banana.

The third is that the sweetening power of fructose is 125%. According to On Food And Cooking by Harold McGee, fructose has a sweetening power of 170% below 60C, and 120% when heated above 60C. Ice creams and sorbets are obviously well below 60C, so for an IC/sorbet formula, you would need to calculate it as 170%.

What these flaws add up to is an extremely innaccurate result for sweetening power. The only way to get an accurate sweetening power would be to calculate the amounts of sucrose, glucose, and fructose separately, and use the correct 170% sweetness for fructose. Some fruits also contain maltose and galactose, but rarely more than 2% of total sugars.

Using the textbook formula for a banana sorbet recipe with 60% fruit puree (no sugar added) will result in a sweetening power of 32.6%. Near the top of the recommended range of 25-33%. If we use the same 60% banana puree, but calculating the actual sugar content, we get a total sweetening power of 21.8%. The reason for this huge difference in sweetness is because of the large amount of glucose in banana, which is much less sweet than fructose. I haven't tasted a banana sorbet using this formula to create a recipe, but I'm guessing it's not sweet enough.