ELS/Pacojet

🌮 ✈️ 🌮 ✈️ "When Cooking Became Swiss" 🌮 ✈️ 🌮 ✈️

Instructions for use

To be decided! Should probably label-make on the side for fast reference.

Some quick notes from reading manual (not tested yet):

- specifies a fairly narrow temperature range (-18c to -23c) several times, and that after processing the food will be at about -3c (still freezing, but near melting temperature) - recommends a full 24hr freezing time. not sure if overnight (aka, ~18hr) seems like it should be plenty? or less if starting from regular-frozen? - cleaning seems important. we can do the rinse cycle with just the stuff we have, will need to brush the top of the machine ourselves, similar to espresso machine (but not metal tools) - how the blade gets attached to the machine is important (attach blade first, then the cup, don't try to attach blade to cup then push in together) - blue tab is pressure release - don't overfill! the cup should only fill to the lower indent (about 2/3 full) - mentions that sometimes a bit of liquid on top (like 1 spoonful) helps - haven't seen much info/guidance about how to prepare food: pre-process? just, eg, banana chunks, or need chunks in milk? - sometimes repeat the operation for even smoother

Recipes

Ice-cream ideas:

• cheese
• bananas
• berries
• coffee
• garlic
• pineapple
• melon (eg, watermelon)
• beet
• black sesame
• pumpkin, yam
• mango
• roasted garlic
• roasted parsnip
• persimmon
• avocado
• durian
• jackfruit
• pawpaw

Other ideas: pestos, brassicas (soup/juice?), cocktails (ramos gin fizz?), chimichuri, foams, guac, hummus

- ginger concentrate - compound butter - infused oils

cheese mousse

- 4 parts cheese - 2 parts cream - 1/2 part left-over bread

Hummus

- 400g chickpeas - 100g olive oil - 900g chickpea water - 60g tahini - 30g lemon juice - 7g salt - 2g cumin

4 churns

What We Have

We have a Pacojet "PJ1", aka not a Pacojet 2. W bought it off ebay in January 2022. It has been loved, and we will continue the tradition. The manual says this is a 230v 50hz device, but the label on the bottom of ours says "120 V, 60hz, 8.3 Amp" (so ~1000 Watt).

The pacojet came with the following disclaimer, which also meant we got a reasonably good deal on it:

The machine works great and then ice cream is very smooth so the blades seem to be sharp enough.

What you NEED to know is that the pacojet should be taken into the shop (by calling the number on the front of the machine) in order to run smoothly. It’s a little hard to explain but the churning bar gets stuck in the down position so you need to take off the top (Ive been keeping it unscrewed for that purpose), remove the belt and hand crank it back into positon.

Though the process is a little tedious, I didn’t find it much of a hassle at all I just don’t find myself making ice creams as much.

Our Pacojet came with one steel cup, and a plastic holder cup. It didn't come with the cleaning brush attachment, spoon, or other accessories mentioned in the manual. The blade seems sharp to the touch.

From skimming manuals, this looks mechanically almost identical to the Pacojet 2 and Pacojet 2 plus (which are currently marketed), just a simpler interface and programmable features (PJ1 is just start and some LED digits; the newer machines have repeat, special cleaning mode, etc). Even the blades look the same.

Here is a PJ1 manual found on the internet: File:Pacojet-pj1-manual.pdf

Here are some color pamphlets for the PJ1 from archive.org, in French and Spanish:

• https://archive.org/details/manualzilla-id-6487292
• https://archive.org/details/manualzilla-id-6255036

And what the scholarly literature says about pacojet: https://scholar.archive.org/search?q=pacojet

We also have a EdgeStar CMF151L-1 freezer. This is small ("1.1 cubic feet"), relatively low-power, and should be able to freeze things quite cold (advertised as -20c/-4f).

May want to purchase some more of the steel cups, for freezing.