Ginger and dairy

[JonK]

We were trying to make a ginger raspberry ice cream. Our plan was to add fresh grated ginger to the milk and cream mixture, bring it to steaming (not a boil) and let it steep. Alas, the mixture turned completely into curds and whey. A second try demonstrated that the process of producing curds began even as the dairy was just warming. Since this procedure seems similar to what people do when making plain ginger ice cream, we can't figure out what we are doing wrong.

[liv4fud]

for a long time people from southeast asia have been using fresh ginger while brewing tea (milk-based - latte-type) and we haven't had any complaints of curdling.

and its not the tea as people who don't drink tea still take the latte-type drink with ginger, blackpepper, cardamom... etc.

don't know if you have already flavored the mixture with raspberry (which could be a suspect due to tartness)

but I am by no reason an expert in ice-cream making.

so don't know if I was of any help

[Praties]

I've been thinking about making a ginger ice cream and would have had the same problems. The "Cooking Village" website has this: " When flavoring milk-based dishes (such as custards or ice creams) with ginger, either blanch fresh ginger or use the crystallized form. Fresh ginger contains an enzyme that can curdle milk." If I get Harold McGee's book for Christmas, I could look stuff like this up more easily! The website link is http://tinyurl.com/ce59l
And I found it courtesy of the "Tenacious Flog" foodie blog. So, thanks to you, I found out the "dangers" of ginger and have two interesting looking websites to peruse. Let me know how the ice cream turns out--it sounds delicious!

Praties

[JonK]

Thanks--to both posters--for both the information and the website references, which I've added to my Favorites list.

We needed to proceed with the ice cream before I saw your replies, so I just slightly warmed the milk and cream mixture along with a half cup sugar (some, but not all, of the other ginger ice cream recipes had sugar in the steep), then added the grated ginger. There was a bit of curdling, but not the massive separation into curds and whey as before. Since the mixture was not very hot, I let it steep for about 45 minutes to extract as much flavor as possible. I then filtered it, both to remove the giner and the bit of curds that had formed.

We then went forward with a more or less standard ice cream recipe (adding additional dairy and using eggs as stabilizers), with raspberry puree which we had frozen from our summer crop.

The ice cream tastes great, with a nice subtle ginger flavor mingling with the raspberry fruit. I'm quite happy with the outcome which pretty well matched what I had been envisioning when I came up with the idea.

Next time, of course, I'll blanch the ginger first. You learn something from every recipe, especially the ones that don't work!

Thanks again for the help.

[Jock]

I have a ginger ice cream recipe (which I haven't made for years now I think of it) which calls for steeping the ginger in hot milk. I didn't have any curdling problems with it. I'll look it up tonight and post tomorrow so you can compare with yours.

Jock