Skimmed milk powder

Lait écrémé en poudre

What it is

Marco Polo's account of the Mongol army describes riders carrying a paste of sun-dried milk and reconstituting it in the saddle, long before the spray-drying tower, patented in the 1870s, turned powder into a commodity. What an ice-cream kitchen actually buys it for is not milk but the non-fat solids: protein and lactose that bind free water and keep ice crystals small.

In the kitchen

Keep the milk solids-not-fat near 10 percent of the total weight of an ice-cream base; push much past that and the lactose crystallises in the freezer, turning the ice cream sandy within a fortnight.

Goes with

Cream Egg White sugar Vanilla Glucose syrup Dextrose

Same species

Abura-kasu Amourettes (spinal marrow) Spider steak Bastourma Flank steak Beef

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