/ck/ - Food & Cooking

It doesn't matter if there's water in the ingredients list. Ice cream is about 60% water by weight. Milk is about 90% water. There is almost no functional difference between 100 g milk and a mixture of 87 g water + 10 g skim milk powder + 3 g butterfat that was put through a homogenizer. There may be a small flavor difference if it's a dairy forward flavor like vanilla, but if it's something like chocolate, you're not going to taste the difference even if you try.

The quality of ice cream is typically like 80% determined by the quality of whatever is the flavoring. For vanilla, it's the vanilla extract. For chocolate, it's the cocoa powder. And you can't really tell this from the ingredients list, since high quality and shit quality cocoa will both be just listed as "cocoa powder" or such.

Putting pepper in everything you cook is literally the 17th century equivalent of covering every meal in hot sauce. Stop it.

Anything above 85% is just fedoralord larping. The objectively best cocoa content for dark chocolate is 75-80%.

Drying anything does remove flavor. Whenever water evaporates off, it takes with it a bunch of aromatic compounds. This is because water is a polar molecule and sticks to the aromatic molecules and literally carries them off as it evaporates. This is one of the reasons why you can smell the food as it cooks. Another factor is that some of the aromatic compounds are fairly volatile, so they will also evaporate on their own in the presence of heat even without the help of evaporating water. This is why dry herbs taste different from fresh - they've had some of the components of their overall flavor removed during drying. Similarly, dried beans will taste different from fresh beans.

It's worth noting however that the drying process is fairly analogous to boiling when it comes to flavor degradation. Whenever you're boiling or simmering food, water evaporates off, carrying off flavor, and the heat causes volatile compounds to evaporate. This is why there's little difference between dried herbs and fresh herbs after they've been cooked for a long time, and why you're supposed to add fresh herbs last. Likewise there's probably little difference between fresh beans and dried beans if both are subjected to a long cooking time, but for fresh beans cooked only slightly there will be a noticeable difference.