Color Me A Happy Camper
In the late eighties I had access to very high quality food grade guar gum. The cleanest and purest and for all practical purposes extremely neutral in flavor. Eventually my Rolls Royce guar source dried up, and everything I purchased after that was decidedly NOT neutral in flavor.  Here we are many years later with a new bag of guar gum up on the counter, and very little hope it will be any better than all the others.<br /><br />Let's give it a shot: A favorite recipe (really a recipe concept) was to create a very stiff whipped cream from nothing more than dry nonfat milk powder, frozen fruit, guar gum, flavor extracts & some sweetener. There were a lot of different variations on this theme, which was always a major hit at many ladies' luncheons.<br /><br />The mouth feel and textures generated by this concept could be anything from a soft serve ice cream to an unbelievable mountain of whipped cream just as light or as stiff as desired. All from the exact same quantity of starter ingredients. The more it's whipped, the greater the volume achieved. The only difference between two cups of soft serve ice cream or six cups of fluffy whipped cream was the addition of 2 tablespoons COLD water and simply continue whipping for a few minutes longer.<br /><br />For today's test:<br />I tossed 1/3 cup dry NONFAT milk powder into the food processor along with a teaspoon of guar, 6 ounces FROZEN peach slices, half a teaspoon each of vanilla & almond extract, and some artificial sweetener. That's all. Flipped on the processor and let her run around 3 minutes This was long enough to dissolve the dry ingredients and allow my guar /frozen fruit/NONFAT milk powder combo -&#62; to do its magic.  AND IT DID. :) Color me a happy camper.<br /><br />The textures achievable are just great. I give it five stars. Flavor-wise:  The guar taste itself is very mild and completely acceptable.  Four and half stars.
Rating: 5 stars