Blueberry buttermilk ice cream

My original plan was to make an olive oil ice cream, and I bought the blueberries to go with that, but I've got to get rid of this buttermilk and buttermilk and blueberries are a classic combination. Maybe too classic, really. This certainly isn't the most innovative ice cream I've ever made in concept, although, since I'm adapting Jeni Britton's basic recipe instead of adding a bunch of egg yolks again, there is some originality in practice.

Ice cream base ingredients:
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
1 cup milk
1 cup heavy cream
1 1/2 ounces cream cheese
3/4 Tablespoon corn starch
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Mix corn starch with two Tablespoons on milk in a small bowl.

2. Heat buttermilk, milk and heavy cream in a medium pot to boiling. Turn heat down to low and simmer for five minutes.

3. Meanwhile, whip cream cheese until fluffy.

4. Remove milk mixture from heat, whisk in corn starch mixture and return to heat for a minute or two until it thickens slightly.

5. Strain milk mixture into the container you're going to store it in. Whisk in cream cheese, vanilla and salt. Let cool on counter for a half hour then in refrigerator for at least two hours until it reaches 40 degrees before churning.


The blueberry swirl is adapted from a blueberry sauce in David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. I'm really not sure if leaving in the cornstarch from the original was a good idea. It'll thicken plenty just from the freezing temperatures. On the other hand, I think the cornstarch improves the texture as it melts on the tongue. I'd have to try it without to be sure, though.

Blueberry swirl ingredients:
1 cup cultivated blueberries (wild don't have enough juice in them)
1 ounce (by volume) sugar
3/4 teaspoon cornstarch
1 1/2 teaspoons cold water
1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice
3 Tablespoons vodka (berry flavored or kirsch if you've got it. Lebovitz suggests crème de cassis as a variation.)
0-2 Tablespoons light honey or agave nectar to taste

1. In a small nonreactive saucepan, heat blueberries and sugar over medium heat until blueberries begin to release their juices. Smush them up a bit to help the process along if you're getting impatient.

2. Mix the cornstarch with the water and lemon juice until smooth. When the pan is full of more juice than berries, add the cornstarch slurry, stir well, bring to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer and cook for 1 minute more.

3. Remove from heat and mix in the vodka. Let cool slightly and check the flavor. Don't worry about any alcohol bite; that goes away in the freezer. Make sure it's good and sweet as the cold dampens that down.

4. Pour into a storage container and store in the freezer until you're ready to start churning the ice cream. At that point, remove to the kitchen counter to thaw. Once the ice cream is ready, give the swirl a good stir to make sure it's at least vaguely liquid. You can either pour it into the churn to let it swirl for you for 10 seconds or so, or do it manually.


I chose to do it manually since I was doing another mix in too. I figured this wasn't interesting enough as is and added chunks of a blueberry buttermilk oat quick bread I baked a few days previous. I made the recipe just as I found it at The Kitchn so I'll send you over there instead of making this post any longer.

Mine didn't turn out nearly as fluffy as theirs. I think they meant to say 2 teaspoons of baking soda, not baking powder, as the baking soda would react with the acid buttermilk to make bubbles to raise the loaf.
Fortuitously, the dense chewy bread worked rather well as an ice-cream mix in when a light cakey bread would have fallen apart into crumbs. All's well that ends in ice cream, I always say.

Here's everything piled up before I swirled it together. Actually, I did more of a fold. It worked out better than my swirling usually does so I'm going to stick with that technique in the future.

And here's the final result:


Pretty isn't it?

I was hoping all that alcohol would keep the swirl liquid, but it doesn't quite. It does melt rapidly on the tongue, though, releasing a burst of tart blueberry flavor over the creamy tangy buttermilk base. Most folks misidentified the tanginess as from cream cheese as there's a distinct cheesecake flavor here (and I've let the cream cheese age to create a cheesecake flavored ice cream before).

There's the occasional intact berry in there which has a little bit of icy crunch, but not so much that it's unpleasantly crunchy. The quick bread is a nicely sweet contrast to the other components, both of which aren't actively un-sweet, but do have more prominent flavors hiding their sugar content. I was afraid the bread would freeze hard, but it's waterlogged so it's soft and a bit crumbly. Not really necessary, but if you used flavored liquor in the berries, it might be nice to soak the bread in a little of that too. There's a lot of good stuff going on here with all those different flavors and textures working well together.

I still want to do an olive oil ice cream but I'm thinking of pairing it with a dark chocolate stracciatella and fleur de sel.

Buttermilk-brined southern-fried chicken gizzards

For some of you, I know, this is standard fare--nothing worth blogging about, particularly since it isn't my recipe. But for me this is exotic ethnic fare and one step closer to my unfulfilled pledge to eat more offal.

Also, I don't think I've ever soaked chicken in buttermilk before--the recipe calls it a brine, but there's no salt so it's just a soak--even though it's a standard Southern technique. There seem to be a few different reasons to do so. The acid in the buttermilk tenderizes chicken and, a lot of recipes say, keeps it moist. Those both seem logical enough. Acid breaks down tough proteins; Normal meat might get mushy, but tough meat gets tender. And soaking in any water-based liquid plumps up meat which lets it stay moist through cooking. Gizzards can use the help in both regards, but for a whole chicken, these days it's tough to find the old well-exercised birds would need this sort of processing.

A lot of places also say that a buttermilk soak makes the breading extra crispy. That doesn't make a lick of sense, but it does work and I think I've figured out why.

[If you'd like a bit more information, later I tried prepping the gizzards by simmering instead and compared the results. That post is here.]

The recipe I used called for soaking one pound of chicken gizzards and a coarsely chopped small onion in buttermilk to cover (maybe a cup and a half) for a day or two. I did two only because it was too hot in the kitchen the first evening.

After the soak, I drained but didn't rinse the gizzards and cut them into pieces about an inch across, removing the sinew-iest bits.


For the breading, there's an egg dip and then a simple seasoned flour coating: 1 cup flour, plenty of salt and spices of choice. My choice was Gullah Cuisine's Fried Chicken Seasoning. The recipe suggests Old Bay which could be interesting, too.


And then deep frying at 350 degrees for two to three minutes. I did a rather better job of regulating my oil temperature this time than I usually do so I'm quite pleased with that.



Here are the results--perfectly golden brown, crispy, spicy, chewy--but not too chewy--meaty, slightly gamy and slightly tangy. Yummy. In most fried chicken, the meat has a hard time competing with a highly flavored breading, but the gizzards definitely hold their own and the combination of flavors is very nice.

You can see the lovely knobbly crust. That's the extra-crispy crust from the buttermilk. Specifically, it's from the excess egg-and-buttermilk mixture that dripped into the flour as I breaded the gizzards. Because the buttermilk is thicker than standard milk and certainly much thicker than a watery brine, you get nice cohesive little lumps of batter instead of just generally wet flour. The later the batch, the more lumps adhered to the meat with more crispy flaky convolutions on the final product. Luckily, there was plenty of the breading left, so I'm keeping the leftovers in the refrigerator as a head start for the next time. Do other people do that? I don't think I've heard of anyone doing that.