The Struggle:
We talk about ice creams and their frozen friends quite often here. We commonly work through the struggles of covering the ice crystals and making smooth creamy textures. We have a few ingredients that work really well to accomplish these very tasks. For hundreds of years ice cream was made the same way, a mixture of cream and sugar is frozen while under constant agitation. This makes an emulsion of ice, fat, and sugar water into a magical dessert. But what if we took this method and turned it on its head. What if we did everything wrong but the end result was more than just “right”, it was perfect? Well that’s what happens when using a Pacojet. This machine makes the most amazing purees, but how exactly does it produce such magical results?
“What is a Pacojet and how does it make everything so smooth?”
Jet Setting
The pacojet is amazing, in its most simple uses it makes the best and most consistent ice cream ever. It breaks all the rules of traditional ice cream making but allowing you to freeze the entire container of ice cream base solid. The Pacojet then can be used to churn ice cream on demand from a frozen beaker of ice cream base. The paco jet uses a high speed blade to shave the block of ice cream base and whip it into a smooth consistency. One of the best parts of using the paco jet is that you do not need to churn the entire batch of ice cream. Actually depending on the model you can dial into the perfect amount per recipe. This provides you with zero waste and consistent results. An added feature is the ability to add air to the mixture. If you are making ice cream you can incorporate air to get that light texture. On the other hand you can make sure there is no air added to keep your gelato’s rich and dense. A part of the design of the pacojet is that the motor is located far from the beaker so the blade will not heat the contents of the beaker.
The Pacojet does more than just ice cream and gelato. Anything that could be blended could be placed in the Pacojet. Soups, purees, compound butters all work in the Pacojet. For this we wanted to test just that. We were able to make an amazing chimichurri sauce. We wanted it to be smooth and bright green. The blade not adding heat to the mixture kept the chimichurri sauce the perfect color. Another recipe we were able to make was a whipped chicken liver pate, which is about the furthest thing from an ice cream as one could get. We sousvide the livers with bacon, onions, and aromatics. Generally these things would need to be blended and strained. With the Pacojet we were able to utilize all of the bacon and onions without needing to strain them out. The Pacojet turns them into an extremely smooth pate that wasn’t gritty at all. Anything that you need to be smooth as silk the Pacojet has got you covered.
There are two different models of the Pacojet. The Pacojet 2 Plus is the top of the line, this model allows you to fine tune your recipes down to the percentage of air incorporated into the beaker. You can also run the machine on a repeat cycle up to ten times. This little trick will allow you to make even the trickiest of ingredients smooth. The Pacojet Jr, is less expensive and churns at a slightly slower rate than the Pacojet 2 Plus. The Junior does not allow for fractional servings but does allow you the ability to manually adjust the amount of air incorporated into the beaker. Either one of these pieces of equipment are a dream to work with and produce some of the best results across all the recipes we tested. Check out the recipes below and we bet you will be amazed at the outcome.
Ready to get Cooking?
Give our Silky Smooth Chicken Liver Pâté, Dairy Free Pistachio Gelato, and Evergreen Chimichurri recipes a try!
Chicken liver pate is an inexpensive dish that feels ultra-luxe when executed properly. We run this pate through the Pacojet for that unique micro-pureed texture that is impossible to achieve using a regular blender.
This is the test kitchen’s all time favorite gelato, it’s so creamy and rich that you would have a hard time convincing anyone that it’s dairy-free. This recipe can be easily customized, just replace pistachio with the tasty nut of choice. The secret is the advanced technology behind the Pacojet, which allows you to minutely control the amount of puree and air that goes into each individual portion. No waste, no dairy, just undiluted deliciousness.
Tossing out chimicchuri because it turned brown is such a terrible waste. This recipe creates a sauce that stays green for days. The secret? Sodium bisulfite for color preservation and pureeing with a Pacojet. The patented heatless blade system ensures that the color and taste of your chimicchuri is unaltered from start to serve.