From August 6, 2014
Steve Thompson
Emery Thompson 12NW 12-Quart Batch Freezer
foreign [Music] the first thing we’re going to make is an Italian Ice and Italian ice has a lot of different names in New York we call it Italian ice in Philadelphia the same products called Italian water ice down in Arkansas it’s called Greek ices because seven Greek Brothers left Brooklyn went to Arkansas and they said why should we call it Italian ice we’re Greek so they called Greek ices in Hawaii uh Bubby’s ice cream calls it Hawaiian ice a fancy French restaurant calls it sorbet the Italians call it sorbetto it’s all sugar water and flavor it’s all the same stuff it’s just a matter of the different flavors Italian ice in the old days was Lemon Cherry grape orange chocolate those were New York flavors but if I went to a fancy restaurant I might be doing kiwi mango and a set pear you know same sugar water formula just a little bit more upscale same idea but Lily is interesting Lily I knew Lily a very long time ago I was probably about 20 years old when I met Lilly so you know that was a long time ago and Lily was up in Harlem and Lily was his elderly black lady back then and her husband ran the largest um company that supplied security dogs so you could go into Lily’s place and get a great Italian ice and get your leg bit off yeah it was it was wonderful Lily had a formula called Lily with the nuts and she swore me and every other supplier to secrecy until she died and then after that we were allowed to talk about it so now you can go on the internet and you’ll find different variations of Lily with the nuts but for the most part it’s usually only sold in Harlem or in the Bronx you know you don’t see it a lot of places and it’s consists of our usual Italian ice stuff sugar and water but we’re going to use vanilla instead of say lemon ice we’re gonna use some rum and toasted slivered almonds toasted roasted that’s the key if you buy slivered almonds and they haven’t been roasted or toasted they’re just going to turn mushy so we’re I didn’t I was too lazy to toast slivered almonds so I bought something called roasted slivered almonds should be the same thing that were also roasted in honey so I think they could be pretty interesting I have not made this in years so I’m going to rely on Jeff uh to taste it before we make it when you make ice cream um if it comes right out of the machine which you’ll see today you might say you know that’s really good but Steve didn’t put enough vanilla in uh and I probably didn’t uh the flavor blooms over a short period of time what you make this morning is going to taste a whole lot better by tonight the flavor expands that’s true of ice cream with Italian ices what you taste is what you get so you can taste the product uh right when before you freeze it and know that it’s good and you can make slight adjustments I have just you know dozens and dozens of recipes at my website but every one of them if you follow them you’ll have a perfect product except for the Sharknado ice that never took off too well did it uh you notice Sharknado 2. Sharknado 2 was even better it was in HD it was wonderful lots of recipes but you’ll take those recipes in the basic sugar water ratio and flavor is going to get you a great product and then you’ll adapt it to your own personal taste example if I was making this size machine of vanilla ice cream I was using three ounces of vanilla Jeff uses an ounce of vanilla for every quart of dairy product and when you taste his vanilla this afternoon it was far better than anything I did so I adapted my formula to what he does so you can always learn when I go on vacation when Paul and I and Sadie go on vacation we always go to ice cream parlors because you can always pick up a little tip here or some something there we have a convention coming up soon in Lexington Kentucky nikra National Ice Cream retailers Association and a guy named Ford who owns Weber’s ice cream says he’s been to the last 18 out of 19 of them and all the years he’s been in business he said I always learned something new just by talking to other people it’s it’s a friendly business so we’ve got uh gee you’ve got everything three and a half quarts of water two and a half pounds of sugar right here this is just plain cane sugar nothing fancy about it um there’s no difference between cane sugar oh thanks cane sugar and say a brand name like Domino it’s all the same stuff so buy it the cheapest you can sometimes the cheapest is to uh buy it Wholesale in a 100 pound bag many times the supermarket puts this on for sale is what they call a lost leader they want to get you into the store to buy the expensive Frozen Foods so they put sugar down to you know 49 cents a pound and I run in and buy 50 pounds worth so just keep an eye out sugar varies but sugar is sugar [Applause] um so we’re going to pour that in on that note I found that sugar really isn’t sugar uh I buy like Steve I I have a huge bin in the store and I keep 50 pounds at a time and I found that the less expensive store brand sugar plums whereas he’s doing that on purpose yeah so they can’t hear me yeah whereas they said that you’re getting old and you have some bumps where whereas The Dominoes so I don’t know maybe it’s no you’re absolutely right the more expensive sugars have chemicals in them as an anti-clumping agent yeah let me do the same thing they can’t afford to do it in the cheeseburger so if it clumps you just pound it like that you know grab your bag and move it around oh okay well if I was driving your Maserati and had your business so I I’d buy Domino’s all right sugar dissolves very easily in cold water you don’t have to boil the sugar in the water you don’t have to do anything special even if when we pour it in there’s a little line of residue you know a little bit of sugar compared to two and a half pounds of sugar that’s nothing don’t worry about it but dissolve it first yeah don’t pour the sugar right into the machine it’s a terrific abrasive yeah it’s like sandpaper sugar the sugar is again make sure the gates closed open that up we’re gonna pour this in you can see I spilled a little uh uh okay so we’ve got the water we’ve got the sugar here’s just measured out the vanilla and the rum and the rum’s in here too okay great well with only one measuring cup I had to do double duty that’s fine and I’m just going to mix that up and then ask Jeff to try it yeah thank you question was why don’t you put the rum and uh vanilla in with the sugar and water you could it makes no difference it’s all going the same place I told you he’s trouble yeah you’re right uh okay gonna have you taste that no just a spoon spoon Ah that’s the only way I can do it this is called a squeeze cup there you go let me know how the proportions are obviously perfect wow he once said that at the turn of the last century okay um this is the infinite overrun control nuts yeah we’re gonna put that in this is the infinite overrun control this allows me to vary the speed of the machine uh quite simply uh to talk about air content and and let me get a couple of points real quick nobody ever walked out of an ice cream parlor and said you know what that’s the best damn air content ice cream I ever ate people don’t eat air content they eat flavor um so if you took some heavy cream and put it in here and stirred it with a whisk it’s going to remain heavy cream if you take the heavy cream in an electric mixer which can go much faster and put it in here it’ll turn into whipped cream same concept with my infinite overrun control which is now 12 years old we can raise and lower the speed of the drive to give us a very heavy custard the next lighter one up would be gelato and then would be call it Haagen-Dazs then Super premium and then homemade so you can adjust that with a shorter water it doesn’t make any difference there’s no fat cells in sugar and water so it’s not going to expand more than approximately 17 percent if you take this formula and put it into ice cube trays remember what an ice cube tray look like and you put in that and fill it up high and put it in your freezer you’ll notice that those ice cubes Crown over a little bit that’s the water expanding if you don’t put antifreeze in your radiator of your car it breaks the engine block because the water expands the normal expansion of water is 17 percent so that’s all you’re going to get in addition to running it so speed doesn’t matter so I’m going to hit begin I’m going to go to uh Italian ice and I’m going to hit start and it’s going to immediately take me up to the speed that I want for Italian ice which is full speed on this machine now I’m going to turn on the refrigeration and We’re Off to the Races make sure the water is turned on to the machine there’s no kinks in the water line I should see water coming out here and I do we’re good to go now I don’t put a timer on the machine um anything you put on this machine built in the United States of America has to have meet National Sanitation Foundation or NSF and Underwriters Laboratories you all know UL so if I put a cheap timer on this machine uh there’s a cheap timer this cost me six bucks if I put that on the machine your cost is going to be about 250 dollars it’s got to be waterproof it’s got to be NSF it’s got to be ul and it’s tied into the machine which is what other companies do so if this six dollar timer breaks it takes down your whole machine if I just buy a cheap timer for six dollars and set it for whatever time I want and let it sit there if that breaks I just pick it up and I throw it away and go buy a new one you know it’s it’s no big deal it’s a I don’t want gadgets on my machine and a timer is a gadget the other thing I don’t want on my machine is little dinky hose that comes out and you can spray it right here well I’m sloppy I’m I’m you know making a mess over here I’m making a mess over there and this is just cold water you ever tried cleaning up butter fat or butter with cold water your spirit smear it on your floor and see if cold water will clean it up so I would just spend a little bit of money and have a hose reel here hot and cold water that I could come over here I can hose down the whole machine I can hose down the floor I can hit Jeff you just get the whole area nice and clean very simple no unnecessary gadgets so this is going to run the the nuts thank you we’re going to add the nuts without the nuts yeah now this is the only Machinery on the market this is simple this is the only machine on the market that you can add things to it nuts cookies candies when I do a trade show I just drive the competition insane because I take a couple pounds of bananas and just peel them and just drop them right in the machine they’ll void your warranty if you do that because their freezing cylinder is so paper thin that putting nuts into the machine will damage it ours is six times thicker you’ll see when I give you the tour of the factory uh we don’t stamp our cylinders to be paper thin spaghetti pots we take plate stainless steel and we roll it on a big machine and then we weld it weld on the back plate and that’s cylinders forever but everything goes in why do I want to put it in because if I’m adding it out here it’s Lily with nuts added to it if I add it in here it’s Lily with the nuts for every particle of lemon vanilla Italian ice there’s a a piece of a toasted slivered almond next to it if I’m making strawberry ice cream for every particle vanilla there’s a particle of strawberry next to it um so there’s a downside to that and that is if I put whole strawberries in here because they’re so soft it’s going to grind them up like a Cuisinart so if you’re a blindfold and you taste it you say yup yup that’s strawberry ice cream you take the blindfold off and all you see is a pale pink ice cream it has the flavor but it doesn’t have any idea what are the strawberries so my recipe on the about this size machine would call for a quart of strawberries I’d put half a quart in the machine so I get my fruit flavor and the second half instead of opening the gate which you’ll see me do and discharge it all in less than 30 seconds maybe I’ll open it halfway and I’ll just shake in my pieces of strawberry so I have the flavor inside the machine and the identity of what it is as it’s coming out along that line Jeff as you can see from his shirt is is enamored with dies but he doesn’t use them in his ice cream you go look at his ice cream am I correct you don’t use dyes Never Never Dies no red dye 40 no yellow 17 no green yeah it’s you don’t want it um so Jeff’s uh might have a pale pink ice cream and um you taste it and you say oh that’s fantastic oh with Jeff you taste it you say oh that’s great that’s a wonderful red raspberry ice cream that’s a good ice cream maker if you go to an ice cream parlor and you taste a pale pink ice cream and you say that’s delicious what is it well the ice cream maker just failed at their profession because you can’t tell that it’s red raspberry instead of strawberry so it didn’t have enough flavor we can talk all day about machines and overrun and all that but when it comes down to it what counts here is flavor flavor is what people eat and if you don’t have good flavor and sufficient flavor you don’t have ice cream so it’s really just that simple um so this will keep running and when this is ready we’ll pull it out and we have a couple ways of serving it this is a New York way of eating it uh we call that a squeeze cup now if you ask your paper supplier to get you squeeze cups unless he’s from Brooklyn or the Bronx or Manhattan he’s going to look at you like a deer deer in the headlights he doesn’t know what a squeeze cup is it’s a technically known as a pleated like a ladies dress a pleated water cup so if you go into a into our kitchen let’s say and there’s the water cooler there and you grab a cup and get some water that’s a pleated water cup we use it as an Italian ice cup and have for a hundred years put the Italian ice in there and eat it up from the bottom and and then you throw it away so it’s a lot of fun it saves you having to have spoons and bowls and everything else so that’s that’s the New York way of serving it but you serve it the way people are going to like it I once was doing a trade show National Restaurant show in Chicago and this young lady comes in and she’s from Laguna Beach California and we’re talking ices and I give her a sample of ice and I give a tour in a squeeze cup but then I hand her a spoon and she goes she looks at me incredible she says what’s that for I said because you’re from California said oh but I grew up in Brooklyn so she knew what a squeeze cup was but these are a lot of fun um the only difference in this product between Italian ice and sorbet is that there’s a nice uh fancy dish uh for this squeeze cup of four ounces I’m probably gonna get a dollar fifty to two dollars it’s gonna cost me about six cents to make with the rum a little bit more if I put the same product into this nice cup and call it a vanilla rum sorbet I can sell this in a restaurant for about seven or eight dollars after dinner same product just different marketing that’s all it is where’s the mix the mix is in the refrigerator out there yeah question yes ah the question is when you had to start worrying about liquor licenses immediately uh every state is different about their liquor licenses they they have rules and regulations where I’m from New York is surprisingly one of the most liberal uh in the country and you want to tread lightly so you have a friend called the state and ask them what’s the quantity that I can put into a pastry because pastry shops have been making uh Baba rums forever and they have rum in them so let someone else you know I don’t want to uh okay this is about ready I don’t want to uh call up the health department and say I’m Steve’s Ice Cream Parlor and I want to put booze in everything you know they’re going to be knocking on your door you’re opening up bureaucracy you know call somebody else and if your stores in Miami call Tallahassee you know another part of the state we do that in California all the time Los Angeles is a nightmare to deal with and Sacramento is quite easy so all my customers call Sacramento uh but they’ll tell you what the the amount is that you can put in uh this is ready I’m going to turn off the refrigeration how do I know it’s ready is I’m opening and closing it and it cuts off like a knife went through Ken can you zoom in on that see how that cuts off and has a nice dry look to it so here we go Lily with the nuts and from here I would go to another flavor similar actually on this one it’s so unique because it’s got rum in it it’s got almonds I’ll rinse out the machine if I was doing vanilla ice cream I would then go to Strawberry Bordeaux cherry black raspberry pistachio nut salad each one’s a fruit flavor and going darker and darker as we go down so uh spatula if we see one here we are again I kept my sterile water off to the side so I can just dip it in there hibiscus tomatoes and that’s gonna really empty that out and we turn it off that’s how easy it was let me just show you that I’ll just get the camera on that and that’s Lily with the nuts so come on up and try this come on [Music] um napkins you’re asking the world here you go uh I got zeroles over on the left for on the left which left that left okay that’s a valid question stage right or stage left there you go thank you I don’t know yeah that’s what they always because it’s got the rum in it can I have one for my older sister yeah sure all right [Music] thank you [Music] Sammy come here girl [Music] foreign