Ice Cream Class

Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

Liquid nitrogen makes it easy to separate raspberries or similar fruits (blackberries, boysenberries, etc) into individual druplets. The druplets have a unique, gummy texture when partially frozen and a juicy, bursting texture when fully thawed. What’s a druplet, you ask? Here’s a bit of botany for you: The term <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/24667/angiosperm/73121/Fruits#ref597022">_druplet_</a> refers to a smaller version of a drupe (such as a peach or a nectarine). Each unit of a fruit such as a raspberry or blackberry is itself a small drupe, with a fleshy outer layer and an inner endocarp that adheres to a seed. In other words, each node of the raspberry is made up of the same elements that make up an entire peach. When the node is large and stands alone, like a peach, it’s called a drupe. When the fruit is made up of several small nodes, the nodes are called druplets, and the entire fruit is called a berry.

Liquid Nitrogen Berry Drops