My ice cream is great tasting but it gets very hard over time and has a lot of ice crystals. I realize that I have to freeze it faster to reduce the size of the ice crystals but it was suggested to me to use guar gum to help. I tried adding it but it clumped up (like gum not surprisingly, lol) so do I have to put in a little boiling milk to dissolve it or how should I add it next time? The ice cream was a little stringy or syrupy after adding it to the ice cream. Did I add too much? I used a tsp of guar gum for a home size Hamilton Beach ice cream maker. I am allergic to corn so I can't use xanthum gum unless I can find a corn free source. I'm hoping that I can get the guar gum to work.
How to add guar gum when making ice cream
ice-cream
Related Solutions
To expand michaels answer (assuming that you want strawberry icecream and not pieces of strawberry mixed in).
If you are making a custard ice cream, leave the amount of egg yolks the same, because you want the lecithin from them. Reduce the sugar somewhat, because fruit is sweet. Then decide how much fruit puree you want (maybe 1/3 the volume of the dairy part). Adjust the volume of the dairy so that the liquid is correct. Adjust the fat of the dairy so that the fat content is correct.
Example, you start with the recipe for vanilla ice cream French (=custard) style by Lebovitz.
1 cup (250ml) whole milk; A pinch of salt; 3/4 cup (150g) sugar; 1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise; 2 cups (500ml) heavy cream; 5 large egg yolks; 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
This recipe has 185g fat (I calculated with 30% fat in the cream), 460g dry matter (this is both fat and non-fat) and yields 990g ice cream (rounded a bit). Let's say that you decide to use 200g strawberry puree. 200g strawberry puree has 10g sugars, 18g dry matter and no fat. A mixture of 5 yolks, 140g sugar (if you want, you can look at the fructose sweetness coefficient and change the sugar accordingly, but I think this isn't so much of a problem if we just substitute the 10g from strawberries), 200g strawberry puree and some salt and vanilla has 25g fat, 225g dry matter and weighs 430g (rounded). You could create two equation systems, the first for the total volume of the dairy mixture needed, and the second one for the ratio of cream to milk, and solve these to get to a mixture with the original ratio.
fatamount/total = fatpercentage liquidamount/total = liquidpercentage fatpercentage + liquidpercentage + nonfatdrypercentage = 1
where you know fatamount, liquidamount and nonfatdrypercentage is around 0.1 (actually 0.08 for milk only and 0.12 for cream only, but we don't need so much precision). Solve for total, then calculate fatpercentage.
0.3*cream + 0.04*milk = fatpercentage*(milk + cream) milk + cream = total
I will take a shortcut here. I specified almost as much strawberries as milk. They have no fat (unlike milk), but a similar (actually higher) amount of dry mass. So let's see what happens when we keep the 500g cream and turn the 50g difference between strawberries and milk into cream too (because we suspect we want some more fat). Then we have 190 g fat, 290g dry matter and 980g ice cream base. At 19.38% fat, we are above the ratio given in the article, but close to the original ratio (and I suspect that the article might be about Philadelphia style ice cream, which has less fat). The 29.59% dry matter are again outside of the article recommendation, but close to the original recipe. In fact, I assume that well emulsified fat can prevent ice crystal creation, so the higher liquid content doesn't create problems here (also note that McGee gives a 10-20% range for fat in ice cream, not 7-12%).
Long story short: don't add fruit puree, it is mostly water. Substitute puree for milk, calculate the new percentage of fat and dry matter (use the 7-12% fat and 37-42% liquid for a recipe without emulsifiers, you can be freer if you have emulsifiers; egg yolk counts as emulsifier). If you are still not there, try the calculation with less puree, or increase the fat and/or dry matter until you are in the recommended range. Or just start with the equations.
NB #1 I didn't check my calculations, could have a mistake there. But the principle should be correct.
NB#2 I calculated with cream density of 1. This was somewhat surprising, but the nutrition data for cream I found insists that a cup of cream (240 ml) weighs 238 g, so the difference is small enough to not go to the trouble to convert. A recipe given by volume probably (hopefully) has some leeway, so this shouldn't skew the results into a bad recipe.
Completely untried idea about efficient testing: You might be able to evenly divide a batch after churning, and stir a different, carefully measured amount of guar gum into each. (I'm not sure if you'd need to pre-dissolve it in a bit of cream). Then you could freeze them all at once, and test for texture. Hopefully your favorite ratio of guar gum will be less than or equal to the average ratio of the batches, so that you can then let it all soften and mix it back together (possibly with additional guar gum), and refreeze. If you're careful to not let it soften too much, you shouldn't have to rechurn it.
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Best Answer
Where are people getting the idea that Xanthan gum comes from corn?It does not. It is harvested from bacteria (Xanthomonas campestris).
If you are using a cook-up custard to start with, your custard will thicken but will also get ropy or the term is snotty when you pour a spoonful out as you stir. That is definitely a good way to tell if you are using too much Xanthan gum so you need to cut your amount down. You sometimes see that effect in cheap, fat free salad dressings.
It takes less gum than a starch because a gum holds much, much more water than a starch. Where you might use a tablespoonful of cornstarch, you would only use maybe 1/8 teaspoon of gum and that might be a little too much. Gums go into liquid if they are mixed with other dry ingredients or they have heat treated to dissolve instantly. Those are usually only sold commercially so you would not be able to buy them on the internet.
My husband makes a "to die for" cooked vanilla and chocolate custard and freezes it. But it is as hard as a rock after freezing. I am still working on him to let me modify the formula to give us softer (not soft-serve) ice cream. I have a masters in food science but I am going to have to make a separate batch to prove it to him. To most people, anything other than flour or corn starch to thicken must be a chemical. Hope that helps.