Philistines In The Galley – The PacoJet Chronicles, Part Deux

For all you Philistines out there that don’t yet own a Pacojet, let me tell you – the PacoJet is not merely a prohibitively expensive, jet-powered ice-cream maker, but also a highly-specialized food processing “system” that can make mousses, farces, terrines, soups, sauces, tapenades, concentrates, sorbets, ice-creams, drinks “and more”. It offers a “rewarding experience” and provides a “wholesome, natural” approach to “effortless” cooking, while producing a “superior” product that guarantees to “delight”. And, it allows you “exclusive” membership to an “illustrious circle” of a “over 10,000 Pacojet users”. At least that’s what the man on the users manual tells me.


The PacoJet even has it’s own semantics. To “Pacotize”, is to process something in the Pacojet. Therefore, the person making the product to process is the “Pacotizer”, while being in the act of processing something is “Pacotizing”. If I wake up one day itching to Pacotize something, is that a fetish or an addiction? God, I’m definitely not getting enough sex.

Oh, but I digress.

After freezing my Mochaccino frozen yogurt mixture overnight, I was ready to Pacotize! But the man with the bow tie had lots of “achtungs” and “wichtige empfehlung” in the slew of manuals that accompanied the PacoJet. I read and re-read the instructions and followed the step-by-step process carefully so as not to break anything…



The machine started up with a whirr and I was afraid that the PacoJet might just take off and hover across my kitchen. But it whirred and whirred and whirred – and luckily remained steadfast on the counter… After about 1 minute, all went silent. I pressed the button on the pressure valve, which released a blast of air and signaled that I could now remove my frozen treat.









The PacoJet requires that the base ingredients be frozen to somewhere around –10F, a temperature easily reached in the commercial freezers I’ll have aboard the yacht, but certainly not the case for the old side-by-side here at the crew house. So, the yogurt was a bit soft after the pacotizing – about the consistency of a thick milkshake. Nothing an hour or so in the freezer couldn’t fix – and this gave me a chance to test something else out as well. I had read that making ice-creams and sorbets in the PacoJet required that the bases be “tempered like hell” or they would not hold in the freezer without freezing up solid and thus requiring the product to be re-Pacotized before serving. So, after about and hour in the freezer, I tasted the Mochaccino frozen yogurt and the consistency was like that of the best gelato – dense, rich and creamy. However, my ingenius idea of making Mochaccino frozen yogurt – wasn’t so ingenius after all as the tartness from the yogurt, the richness of the dark chocolate and too much coffee powder made for taste bud overload and after two spoonfuls, I couldn’t eat another bite. But all was not lost. I left the concoction in the freezer for two more days, and it still maintained its perfectly creamy texture without having to re-Pacotize!

A few days later we had some wine service and bartender training for the crew – so I decided to test out a Riesling sorbet (with lemon zest and mint - and black pepper, parmesan biscotti on the side). The sorbet came out light and fluffy, like fresh snow! And the flavors far surpassed my frozen yogurt experiment! Although I would’ve liked to see how the sorbet held up in the freezer – it just didn’t last that long…