ice-creamery • A collection of my tested / approved Ninja Creami recipes.

Contents

• What's this?
• Structure of the recipe spreadsheet
  • The rows in the sheet
  • Freezing Point Depression Factor explained
• How to convert a recipe to Markdown?
• How to get a live version of a recipe?
• Tips & Tricks

What's this?

The recipes folder contains a template spreadsheet for LibreOffice, with a full ingredients list of brands as available to me in Germany. You can re-use generic rows like "Strawberries", and also add your own brands.

The Open Food Facts website and app makes this more efficient than dragging half of your fridge's and cupboards' contents to your computer. 😉

The scripts folder has some utilities, right now a script to convert a recipe sheet to its Markdown rendering.

Structure of the recipe spreadsheet

Each sheet in a Calc document based on the Ice-Cream-Recipes.fods document is a duplicate of the template sheet. The script that converts a recipe to Markdown relies on the structure described here, so you cannot easily change that without also adapting the script.

The rows in the sheet

The first row contains the name of the recipe, taken from the sheet name by default.

What follows is nutritional information for 100g, half a Deluxe tub, and the total weight of a specific recipe. Note that only ingredients measured in grams or milli-liters contribute to the total, drops, pinches and so on are ignored. Anything measured in milli-liters is assumed to have about the same density as water (i.e. 1g/cm³).

Where that is not really the case like with alcohol, you better measure ingredients in grams on a scale, instead of volumetric measuring that is so prevalent in the US. Some margin of error is acceptable here, e.g. with alcohol-based vanilla extract that isn't used in large amounts anyway.

⚠️ To adapt the template to a regular Creami, change Deluxe to Regular in row 1 of the sheet, and the 2nd row in the nutrients summary table. Also change the amount of 360g to 240g in that row, or another preferred serving size.

Below the macros, there is a formula for the total freezing point depression factor (FPDF). See the next section for details.

Then there are a few empty rows that can either contain text (in the first column), that in Markdown is added below the recipe title contributing to a recipe description or summary.

If the second column is also filled, the A and B columns are interpreted as a key / value pair added to the final NUTRITIONAL & OTHER INFO section of a recipe rendering.

Finally, you have the ingredients list with the name, amount & unit, and further nutritional facts per 100g, one ingredient in each row. The # column is a recipe step / ingredient type number: 0=prep, 1=wet, 2=dry, 3=top off, 4=mix-in. The last column is a free-form comment field, added after the name in the text version of the recipe.

Freezing Point Depression Factor explained

The FPDF is a key indicator towards the softness of the frozen base at serving temperature (typically -12°C). It is given relative to the effect table sugar (sucrose) has on the freezing point, and ranges from inulin with 0.1 to pure ethanol at 7.4.

To evaluate the expected softness of a base, the total FPDF is calculated from the weight of ingredients, as the sum of weight[g] * specific FPDF over all sugars / sweeteners (in 100g of ice cream mix), with lactose typically included in the EU (PAC value). Apart from the lactose inclusion, Potere Anti Congelante is just another name for FPDF.

Ice cream stored at -18°C with a total FPDF of 20..25 will be easily scoopable, while bases with TFPDF<15 will be quite hard. Ice cream is considered soft enough when about 65% of the contained water molecules are frozen at serving temperature.

How to convert a recipe to Markdown?

To save a single recipe sheet as a CSV file and convert it to Markdown:

1. Select File > Save a Copy... from the menu.
2. Enter Ice-Cream-Recipes.csv as the file name, and choose Text CSV as the type, then press Save.
3. Change export settings to match the ones shown below, then press OK.
4. Call the ice-cream-recipe.py script. It renders the Markdown file, and then opens your editor with it (code by default, unless the GUI_EDITOR envvar is set).

How to get a live version of a recipe?

Note that to get a version of recipes that you can change and experiment with, you can plug the ingredients list of a CSV file like Ice-Cream-Recipes.csv into the template spreadsheet Ice-Cream-Recipes.fods, containing live formulas. Just load both files into Calc and copy the ingredient rows in the CSV document to the FODS one.

This allows you to replace the nutritional information with the values of the brands you can buy locally, or experiment with alternatives and a different composition.

I did not test if Excel can read the FODS format properly, but then the LibreOffice Suite is a free install that works in parallel to a Microsoft Office installation.

Tips & Tricks

• It's recommended that, once a recipe is tested and approved, to sort the ingredients by the # column and then the Amount one (descending). This makes the recipe simple to use directly, without first converting it to Markdown.

• Keep all your own recipes in a single ODS file, starting from the FODS template. Then duplicate the Template sheet, rename it to the recipe name, and fill in your amounts. After sorting like described right above, remove any rows with zero amounts.

• Add journal entries to your sheet like this:

  

  This is especially useful while experimenting and when you don't want to use git yet, where commit messages would take that place.