Blended & Frozen
A liquid, a frozen solid and something sweet, driven through a blender until the solid stops being a solid. The only family where texture is the recipe.
The formula
90 ml : 150 g : 15 ml
- Liquid
- What the blender has to work with. In a frozen cocktail it is the spirit and the citrus; in a smoothie or a lassi it is milk, yoghurt or juice. Too little and the blade cavitates and spins in a hole; too much and the drink is a cold beverage rather than a frozen one.
- Frozen solid
- The slot that makes the family. Ice in a frozen daiquiri, frozen fruit in a smoothie, ice cream in a milkshake. The shape does not care which, only that a solid enters the jug and leaves as texture. It is also the whole dilution model here, which is why it is weighed rather than guessed.
- Sweetener
- More than the same drink would take at room temperature, and that is not a mistake. Cold suppresses sweetness, so a frozen drink balanced warm arrives tasting thin. Whatever sugar is already in the fruit or the ice cream counts against this slot.
The one family where ice is authored as an ingredient rather than left to the dilution model, because it does not melt into the drink; it becomes it. Members vary the three slots enormously; a milkshake has almost no free liquid and a smoothie has almost no added sugar. Their own pages carry the real figures.
Members on this site
Everything else in this book is a set of proportions. This family is a set of proportions and a texture, and the texture is the harder half. Two people can follow the same frozen daiquiri recipe and produce a slush and a soup, because the recipe does not contain the ratio that actually decides the outcome: how much water is present, and how much of it is frozen at the moment it is poured.
The liquid slot is what the blade needs to move. A blender does not cut through a solid mass; it needs a vortex, and a vortex needs enough liquid to form. Under-liquid the jug and the blade carves a cavity, spins in air and warms everything around it while appearing to work. This is the most common failure in the family and it looks like a blender problem rather than a recipe one.
The frozen solid is the family's defining slot and the reason it is a family at all. Ice, frozen fruit and ice cream are doing the same structural job: entering as a solid and leaving as suspended crystals fine enough to drink. What distinguishes them is what else they bring. Ice brings only water, which is why a frozen cocktail needs to be built stronger and sweeter than its shaken counterpart to survive it. Frozen fruit brings sugar, acid, fibre and colour, so a smoothie needs almost nothing added. Ice cream brings fat, sugar and air, and the air is why a milkshake is thick at a much lower solid fraction than anything else here.
The sweetener is larger than instinct suggests. Sweetness perception falls sharply with temperature, and a drink served below zero reads perhaps a third less sweet than the same liquid at room temperature. A frozen drink adjusted to taste while it is still liquid in the jug will always be under-sweetened by the time it is in the glass, so the correction is made in the recipe rather than at the end.
Two things do not appear in the formula and decide the result anyway. The first is blending time: every second the blender runs adds heat, so the technique is short bursts at full power rather than a long gentle one, and a drink blended twice as long is not smoother, it is warmer. The second is service. Nothing in this book is as time-limited: a frozen drink has a matter of minutes before it separates into slush and water, which is why the glass is chilled first and why this family is unbatchable in the ordinary sense. What can be prepared ahead is the mix; the freezing is the last thing that happens.
The members split along one line: whether the frozen solid was ever going to be tasted. In the frozen cocktails it was not, and the ice is a texture with a cost attached. In the smoothies, lassis and milkshakes it is the drink itself, and everything else in the jug is there to let it pour.
Descent
Descent is recorded within a family. A resemblance that crosses one is an ordinary cross-link rather than a lineage, and the build enforces the difference.