CSA week two - Chocolate and roasted avocado ice cream

The combination of chocolate and avocado is unusual, but not entirely unheard of. I understand that chocolate-avocado milkshakes are common in Viet Nam and Indonesia. I can see how the creaminess of the avocado could work; as for the flavor, well, I've got a Monroe so it hasn't got much. Using it as is would have been the easy way out, but I decided to try to intensify the flavor and then see what I could do with it.

I chopped up the avocado, sprinkled it with brown sugar for caramelization--I considered adding a bit of butter as I would if I were caramelizing bananas, but it's got plenty of fat of its own--and baked it at 400 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring a couple times. If you compare the before and after pictures, you can see that it's shrunk considerably. The flavor isn't, I think, a lot more intense, but it has transformed. There are a lot of warm, toasty notes now.

Still, the cup of caramelized avocado wasn't really enough to flavor a full batch of ice cream so I looked around for some additions that would pair well without overwhelming it. And also I wanted to use up some scraps left in the refrigerator. Here's what I came up with:

Ingredients:

1 cup caramelized avocado mush
1/4 cup pineapple
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 1/4 cup milk
1 cup cream
3 Tablespoons dutch process cocoa
1/3 cup light brown sugar

I blended all that together and put it in the back of the refrigerator to chill. The texture seems about right at this point so that's good, but I'm still concerned the flavor isn't bold enough to survive freezing. I may add some spices after I taste the fully chilled mixture.
...
Actually, the flavor intensified, but it did turn somewhat bitter. I added another quarter cup of sugar to compensate.

So, to churning. It froze very quickly. Look how it glommed onto the dasher. I've never seen quite the like before and I don't think that bodes well for the texture of the final result. I was hoping the fat in the avocado would help keep things creamy, but I don't see that happening. The fat's not there in the mouthfeel either. It feels like sherbet despite all the cream that went into it. Here's hoping that ripening will help.
...


And here's the final product. The fact that I didn't bother to deal with the freezer burn is probably a biasing factor, but I think despite that, you can see that that it's not terribly attractive. The texture could be creamier--it's definitely more sherbet than ice cream rich--but it melts smooth if you let it warm up out of the freezer for a while before serving. I'm going to blame the roasting here as there are plenty of avocado ice cream recipes that don't appear to turn out like this.

The flavor starts with cocoa, clearly not intense or creamy enough to really feel like chocolate, with a little tropical fruitiness rounding it out and fades into bitter roasted notes not dissimilar to those you get with very dark chocolate. There's definitely a note of avocado there at the end, too, but difficult to identify if you don't know what you're looking for. It might just be an off note if you're expecting straight chocolate (upon which this is definitely no improvement). It just seems like cheap nasty chocolate ice cream. I'm going to take this back home before it ruins my reputation around the office.

Mocha ice cream with malt balls and warm caramel sauce

Sorry about that last post. I really should know better to try such things and just stick to recipes.

This particular recipe is a remake of one of the first ice creams I made when I got my churn a couple years ago. I've updated it into the Britton style, tweaked it a little and added the caramel which I though would go well with the other flavors.

I started by coarsely grinding 12 Tablespoons of coffee beans. Which was a mistake, I think. I added them to 1 1/2 cups cream and 1 1/2 cups milk, brought the mix to a boil, simmered for a few minutes to cook down the dairy a little, turned off the heat, covered and let steep for 10 minutes. That nicely infused the flavor, but the grounds grabbed on to a lot of the milk solids and I ended up mashing them in a sieve to try to get all the good stuff out. Kind of a pain, not terribly effective and some grounds make it through and back into the pot. Since the ice cream was going to be gritty from the maltballs anyway, I thought it would fly, but if I were to do it again, I'd just crush beans, not grind them.

Once the dairy was infused with coffee, I mixed in 1/2 cup sugar which isn't a lot for 3 cups, particularly with the bitterness of the coffee. I wanted to keep the ice cream on the less sweet side so the malt and caramel would contrast nicely. Once the sugar was dissolved, I mixed 1 Tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon corn starch with 3/4 ounce by weight of Dutch-process cocoa (mainly as an aid to getting lumps out of both) and whisked the mixture into the pot and brought it back up to a boil to thicken up. Finally, I whisked in 1 1/2 ounce by volume of cream cheese (whipped up for easier incorporation) and checked for flavor and texture. It was both too intense and too thick so I thinned it out with 1/4 cup of cream.

The malt balls are the fancy sort from the bulk bin at Fresh Market. I think the chocolate to malt ratio is too high, but they've certainly got Whoppers beat. I wanted irregularly sized pieces so I put them in a plastic bag and whacked them with a crab hammer. That's a couple handfuls. I don't know, 1 1/2 cups?

The caramel sauce is only a sauce since it's warm. It's really just a simple soft caramel. I forgot to write down the amounts I used, but I think it was a half cup of sugar, melted, and then the cooking stopped by mixing in 3 Tablespoons of butter and 1/4 cup cream. I may have added a dash of vanilla too. That's all there is to it.

So I chilled and churned the mix, folded in the malt balls and ripened in the freezer. I haven't got a beauty shot of the final product I'm afraid, so you'll just have to use your imagination. I made it for a baby shower that happened while I was away visiting my mother and I never got to taste the fully assembled dish. I asked for them to take pictures, but nobody did. I tried a little of the ice cream and thought the coffee overbalanced the cocoa flavor, but I hoped the chocolate on the malt balls would compensate. I'm told the ice cream went over well and certainly it was all gone when I got back, but I couldn't get any details about how it tasted from those I asked. You'll just have to use your imagination for that too.

Olive oil ice cream

I want to state up top that I didn't come up with the idea of olive oil ice cream. As I'm sure some of you already know, pouring olive oil over ice cream is an Italian tradition. Mixing it in is a pretty obvious next step and I'm far from the first to do it. I may be the first to make a Jeni Briton-style cornstarch and cream cheese olive oil ice cream, though.

The key to making this work is in both the choice of olive oil and exactly how much to use. I happen to have a big jug of La Española extra virgin. It's fruity, a little nutty and smooth without a lot of bite so a good choice for ice cream I think. I rather lucked out on that since I never know what I'm going to get when I buy a bottle of olive oil. I rarely buy a particular brand of olive oil since a) I always want to try something new and b) I keep forgetting to take notes on what I've tried, what it was like and how I liked it. I'm the same way with wine, really. As for how much to use, I decided to go with David Lebovitz's ratio of 1/2 cup of olive oil to 2 1/3 cups of dairy. I don't think I would have used so much I was making the decision on my own, but Lebovitz has rarely steered me wrong.

Ingredients:
1 1/3 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar (I realized belatedly that I only had demarara on hand--no white sugar--but I did a little taste test and liked the pairing with the olive oil so I went with it.)
1 scant Tablespoon cornstarch
2 Tablespoons cream cheese
1 pinch salt
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

1. Mix cornstarch with a little milk and set aside. Whip cream cheese until fluffy and set aside.

2. Heat milk, cream and sugar in a medium saucepan until sugar is dissolved. Whisk in cornstarch mixture and bring to a boil. Simmer 1 minute. Remove from heat and whisk in cream cheese, salt and olive oil. Cool, churn and chill.


I decided, since olive oil ice cream is often paired with chocolate sauce, to make chocolate stracciatella. If you don't remember from the first time I made them (or know from other sources in your full and rich lives), stracciatella are swirls of solid chocolate made by drizzling melted chocolate over ice cream spread out in a tray. I had some trouble getting my chocolate to drizzling consistency. Maybe my cocoa percentage was too high; it wasn't marked so no way to know for certain. So less stracciatella than clumpiatella. I broke it up as best I could and I think it turned out OK. Unfortunately, I forgot the step of firming up the ice cream in the freezer for an hour before drizzling so there was a fair bit of melting while I was fussing with the chocolate. If you want to see it done right, click on the link up there and see my first try at it.

For a finishing touch, I wanted a sprinkling of salt, also a traditional Italian thing. I tried fleur de sel, but it melted too easily into the ice cream. I liked the more intense effect of coarsely crushed sea salt instead.


If you've had Italian olive oil pastries you have a sense of the flavor of the ice cream. Smelling it is like sniffing a bottle of quality olive oil, but when you taste it, the sugar and cream round out the fragrant oil into a full fruity flavor. The match with the chocolate is unexpected, but the two are surprisingly close together, particularly with the addition of the molasses in the demerara sugar I used, and enhance each other. The salt brings out the fruitiness of the ice cream and brightens the flavor of the chocolate too so it's a very nice addition.

Oh, I've just had the idea to top it with balsamic vinegar instead of the salt. (I keep a little container of a 15-year balsamic at work as a condiment.) Just a few drops for a scoop of ice cream and...now that's something else. The bright berry flavors of the vinegar sparkle against rich olive oil background and pair beautifully with the chocolate. Now I see why balsamic truffles exist. There's a whole new level of flavor going on that was missing earlier. That's definitely the way to go.

Marshmallow chocolate malt ice cream

My original plan here was to make a toasted marshmallow ice cream. I've been hearing a lot of buzz about the flavor recently and it sounded worth trying. But I didn't want to just buy a bag of marshmallow, toast them, and then mix them into vanilla ice cream. That's kind of dull and it wouldn't have a very good texture. The places that make toasted marshmallow ice cream and milkshakes have a special process to create kind of a slurry with that flavor that lets them create a smooth mix. But when I looked around I found that the secret processes they use haven't leaked out yet, at least not to anyplace I could find.

So, plan B was malted marshmallow. Malt flavored ice cream with a marshmallow swirl. For a good while I was planning to make a batch of marshmallow sauce and a batch of malted whipped cream, fold them together and call it done. And if I had two bowls for my mixer so I could keep one chilled for the cream while working on the marshmallow I probably would have gone that way. I've seen a fair number of churn-free ice cream recipes using that sort of method and I'm curious as to what sort of texture you can get. But I haven't got two bowls so instead I decided to make a batch of malted milk ice cream in the churn and then swirl in the marshmallow sauce.

Since I needed an egg white for the marshmallow I decided to go back to the custard style for the ice cream. Since I didn't need to infuse any flavor into the dairy, it was a pretty simple recipe. I mixed 9 Tablespoons of malted milk with four egg yolks, added that to two cups of cream and one cup milk and heated until the mixture reached 170 degrees and coated the back of a spoon.

Once it had cooled a bit, I tasted it and wasn't entirely happy so I added a dash of salt and a half teaspoon of vanilla. It still wasn't quite doing it for me so I whisked in 3/4 of an ounce of Dutch process cocoa. That's a bit low for three cups of dairy, but I wanted the malt to be a stronger flavor than the chocolate. That worked a bit too well, so if you're interested in making something similar, you should cut the malt back to 6 Tablespoons and boost the cocoa to a full ounce. And that still didn't quite do it so I added 1/4 cup of sugar and then the flavors started to pop.

The marshmallow sauce was not so easy. Unfortunately, I had such difficulty that I was unable to take pictures as I went along. As I wrote above, I didn't want to start with a bag of marshmallows or a jar of Fluff, so I used David Lebovitz's recipe which was the only one I could find that started from scratch. He uses:

3/4 cup cold water
1 envelope unflavored powdered gelatin
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup (I ran out and used half agave nectar. Didn't seem to hurt.)
1 large egg white
1 big pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (which I thought I forgot, but since the result tastes of vanilla, maybe I didn't)

He says to sprinkle the gelatin over 1/2 cup of cold water and set aside, start heating the sugar and corn syrup with the rest of the water and only beginning to whip the egg white in a stand mixer when the sugar mixture has reached 225 degrees.

I've got a pretty standard stand mixer and the whisk attachment barely reached one little egg white at the bottom of the bowl so it had a heck of a time whipping it. Lebovitz expects the sugar to reach 240 degrees (soft ball stage) at the same time as the meringue reaches stiff peaks, but I found that to be way off. My egg had barely started. I turned down the heat, but the sugar got up to 250 degrees (firm ball) and developed a little color, before the meringue got to soft peaks and I decided it was close enough.

The next step was to slowly pour the sugar syrup into the mixing bowl. Mine ended up clumping and splattering all over the place. I scraped down the bowl and turned the splatter into another clump. Eventually I got it all incorporated, but it was a serious struggle.

The final step was to pour the gelatin into the warm pot to melt it down and dissolve any remaining sugar and then pour into into the mixing bowl as well continuing to whip until the mixture cools to room temperature and thickens. Well, at Miami room temperature, it doesn't thicken.


To make matters more complicated, while I was dealing with all this, I was also churning the ice cream. The mix was a little on the thick side so I had some trouble with it freezing up solid along the sides and bottom of the churn, but once the bucket had warmed up a little, that sorted itself and the mixture smoothed out and froze up well if a little on the firm side. I was hopeful that meant it wouldn't melt readily as I mixed it with the warm marshmallow sauce, but I'm afraid it did and they blended together instead of swirling.

I had more marshmallow than I wanted to mix in so I poured the rest over the top before putting the container in the freezer.

Here it is the next day. You can see the marshmallow strata has turned rubbery. Not good at all, so I scraped it out and melted it down. That worked well at first, but after a while it lost its foaminess and devolved into an increasingly thick sauce as it cooled and the gelatin took hold. The sauce, since I let the sugar get 10 degrees too hot, has a caramel note to it that I can't say I mind at all. It also tastes of vanilla which I'm pretty sure I forgot to put in so I'm not sure how that happened, and, at least after it melted down, a good hit of salt. Also good with caramel so not a problem.

The cocoa I added to the malt ice cream tastes more like cocoa than chocolate so the result tastes like it ought to be chalky in texture even though it isn't. Does that make any sense? It's not a conventional chocolate malt flavor is what I'm getting at here. I'm surprised people accepted it as readily as they did, really. The marshmallow sauce that I hoped to swirl into the ice cream blended instead and tempered the strong malt flavor. It's still not all that sweet but I think that works very well with the intense sweetness of the marshmallow sauce.


A spoonful of the ice cream with the sauce is full of interesting contrasts in levels of sweetness, of flavors, in textures and in temperatures. And it's also yummy, so despite the difficulties, at the end, success all around.

Oh, one last thing. Apparently July is ice cream month and there's an Ice Cream Social blog meme thing. I'm supposed to link back to ScottySnacks, SavortheThyme and Tangled Noodle. You can go to any of those three to see what other folks have done for the challenge. There are some interesting ideas there, so it's worth looking around if you're bored with my ice cream creations.

Banana chocolate bread pudding

Before we get into the recipe here, I want to talk a little about how I came to make it. It's fairly typical for me and I suspect other people go through the same process, but I don't recall ever seeing it written up.

So, my batter bread was a few days old and I still had a quarter of the loaf sitting there starting to get stale. Its flavor was a bit too strong and distinctive for me to want to make bread crumbs and it was too soft and crumbly to slice for french toast.

Bread pudding might work, but savory or sweet? With all the molasses in the bread, it could make an interesting savory bread pudding with pork and barbecue flavors, but I wasn't going to have time to cook a pork shoulder until the weekend and didn't think the bread would last that long. Still a good idea for the other loaf of the batter bread that I've got in the freezer. But for now, sweet.

As the bread as aged, it's started to smell kind of like cocoa--lord knows why--so I think a chocolate bread pudding would be a good choice. I quite like how the dark chocolate worked in the oat bars so I'll use the rest of that if I've got enough. After looking at a few recipes, I don't think I do have enough, but I have got a bar of Lindt dark chocolate that can fill it out. The infused chili oil will actually be a nice touch. Now, if I had more chocolate and not enough bread, this dish would have turned out more interestingly as I would have added some of the corn muffins I have in the freezer. There's a Mexican drink called tejate mixing chocolate, corn masa and spices that I could use as a flavor guide. That would have been pretty cool and I regret that I couldn't go in that direction. Maybe next time.

I've got banana in the freezer that should work well with chocolate and the flavor of the bread so I look around to see if such a thing as banana bread pudding exists. Indeed it does, and banana chocolate bread pudding at that, so I won't have to invent anything new. On one hand, that means its more likely to work out, on the other hand, I don't get to experiment as much unless I deliberately leave myself ignorant of what others have done which I prefer not to do.

When I'm making something that's a known codified dish, I find a bunch of different recipes and examine the similarities and differences. It usually boils down specific choices at various aspects and steps. Here, it's questions like: what ratio of dairy to bread do I use? do I slice or mash the banana? melt the chocolate or leave it in pieces? There are also basic versions and more complex ones that add frills like nuts and spices. There may be different schools of those that pull the dish into various cuisines. Not so much in this case.

Once I've got my options in mind, I sometimes decide what I want to do and write the new recipe out and sometimes I just wing it as I go along. I went with winging it this time and, entirely accidentally, most of the choices I made were the same as Emeril Lagasse's version of the dish. I didn't so much follow the recipe as we were both headed in the same direction.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter, cold and cut into small dice
2 large eggs
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 cup half and half [This is a rather low amount of dairy for the amount of bread so feel free to increase but don't decrease the ratio.]
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon [I considered adding nutmeg and/or allspice, but I go to that too-obvious flavor combination to often.]
1 ripe banana, mashed [frozen and defrosted is even better.]
1/4 cup pecan, chopped
2 1/2 cups bread, diced [baguette or brioche is tradional. My batter bread made a substantial difference in flavor and texture. It's not far off from pumpernickel so that would be a fine substitution here.]
3 ounces dark chocolate, chopped

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush an 8x8" baking dish with the melted butter.

1. In a large bowl whisk eggs with sugar, half and half and vanilla until sugar is dissolved and eggs incorporated. whisk in cinnamon and banana until no banana chunks are in evidence. Stir in pecans, bread and chopped chocolate. Make sure the bread is well coated in the egg mixture and leave a few minutes to overnight for it to soak through. [I just did the few minutes.]

2. Pour pudding mixture into prepared baking dish and bake until just firm and a knife inserted into the center of the pudding comes out just about clean, around 1 hour.

3. Cool pudding in dish until warm. Cut into squares and serve with confectioners' sugar and/or whipped cream and, preferably, a cup of coffee.



I quite like how the flavors of the banana and the bread merged and, for that matter, how the bread, banana and custard physically merged into one solid mass. You can see in the picture that the insides have a texture more like the caramel of the graham cracker gooey bars I made a couple months ago than a standard bread pudding. That only happened because of how soft and crumbly the crumb of this particular loaf was. I don't think a baguette would work nearly the same way.



The pudding had plenty of roasted banana flavor without the chocolate fully distributed so keeping that in chunks was the right choice to give some nice flavor and textural contrasts (the nuts help there too). And, on the textural end of things, the crispy edges were very nice and I wish the top had gotten crisp too. Maybe a minute under the broil would have done it, but I'm afraid I might have burnt the chocolate. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the results. I don't think it was as fabulous as my coworkers said it was, but it was pretty good.

Chocolate oat bars

It's too hot to cook dinner, as I wrote in my last post, but too hot to cook dessert is another matter entirely. Here are a couple desserts I've made recently; I didn't change either so much that I could claim it as my own or justify a proper post, but together I think I have enough to talk about here.

First up, chocolate oat bars. Why I didn't use the recipe I adapted for the black sapote oat bars, I'm not sure, but instead I went out searching the web for bar cookies specifically designed to include chocolate. I found a bunch of recipes, but not a lot of variation between them. The one I settled on was unusual in that it used baking soda. That gave the crust more of a cakey texture than most recipes which I thought worked well. I did change the chocolate layer, though. Instead of using semisweet chocolate and condensed milk which would have been cloyingly sweet I think, I used 6 ounces (by weight) of good quality El Rey 70-some% cocoa dark chocolate mixed with a half cup of milk, a Tablespoon of butter and enough cinnamon sugar to take the bitter edge off and add a spicy edge back on. I also added a fair bit of allspice to the crust, but I can't say I could notice it in the final product.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup white whole wheat flour [I've been substituting white whole wheat flour into a lot of recipes recently and it's done just fine in all of them.]
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups rolled oats [some recipes call for quick-cooking and some call for just plain rolled. I couldn't find any differences in techniques or cooking times so you can use whatever you've got handy. The quick-cooking are broken up more, so you might run plain rolled oats through the food processor briefly.]
1/2 cup chopped pecans

plus the chocolate mixture described above.

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar. When the sugar is fully incorporated, beat in the eggs and vanilla.

2. In another bowl, sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Stir in oats and nuts.

3. Add dry ingredients to wet. Stir to blend but no longer than that.

4. Grease 8x8 inch baking pan. Pour in 2/3 of the oat mixture. Spread into the corners. Pour over the chocolate mixture. Spread evenly. Dollop the rest of the oat mixture on top. [The original recipe talks about patting in mixture into the pan and sprinkling it on top. I must have done something wrong as that was quite out of the question given the texture I had. Well it worked out just fine.] Bake at 350 degrees for 25 - 30 minutes until puffy and browned on top. Cool before cutting into squares.



The results are quite lovely to look at and pretty tasty too. There's quite a bit more chocolate than crust, so each bite has a little bit of the brown sugar and butter flavored cakey crust (not unlike a Toll House cookie, but lighter), followed by a bite of a solid chocolate chunk and sharp cinnamon melting into a whole lot of rich creamy chocolate.

That's plenty long enough. I'll post about the chocolate banana bread pudding tomorrow.

Banana caramel chocolate swirl ice cream

Are you sick of reading about banana ice creams yet? I'm kind of sick of making them. But they're low fat and banana does go with a lot of different flavors so I guess I'll keep at it for a little while longer.

The immediate cause for this ice cream flavor was Kat's recipe for banana caramel chocolate swirl cupcakes. But before that prompt I had a couple ideas on the back-burner. First, I haven't yet made a successful swirl. My raspberry swirl melted into the ice cream; my peanut butter/honey swirl was more like chunks; and my coffee swirl ended up crunchy. A caramel swirl is pretty traditional so I figured I could find a well-tested recipe to use. As for the chocolate, I wanted to try an Italian method called stracciatella which is less a swirl than solid chocolate streaks.

For the base, I used the Good Eats recipe for banana ice cream:
3 medium ripe bananas, (a little over 1 pound), frozen and defrosted
1/2 Tablespoon lemon juice
3/8 cup light corn syrup
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

No cooking required; just blend the lot. I've made this before, but I don't think I used the corn syrup. I don't think I will again either as it gave the ice cream an artificial banana-taffy sort of flavor. I know brown sugar, honey or maple syrup would make good substitutions. I wonder if a light molasses would work. I wish I could get my hands on some sorgum. That would be ideal.

Caramel recipes specifically made for freezing are not as common as I expected. Of the few I found, I went with this one:

3/4 cups sugar
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup whipping cream
20g unsalted butter
1/4 tsp vanilla
pinch salt

Cook the sugar and water over medium high heat until it turns amber. Slowly mix in the whipping cream. Let cool five minutes and stir in vanilla and salt.

That first step is a little tricky, as you know if you've ever made candy. A sugar syrup goes from clear to burnt in seconds even after being removed from the heat. Stopping to take a picture is not a good idea. Mine turned out with a slight burnt flavor, but not enough to make me toss it.

I didn't like how it was thickening up in the refrigerator so I added a teaspoon of rum to thin it out and keep it liquid below freezing.

The stracciatella is even simpler. It's just melted chocolate drizzled over and folded into the frozen ice cream. David Lebovitz demoed the technique on the Gourmet: Diary of a Foodie episode on bloggers. (They focused on the big names who eat their way through food meccas like Paris, San Francisco and Hong Kong. No love for cooking blogs or those of us in nowherevilles like Miami. OK, why does my spell-checker not recognize the word "bloggers" but is perfectly happy with "nowherevilles"?) He recommends using a semisweet chocolate with no more than 60% cocoa. I only have 72% bar on hand, but I've also got a chunk of white chocolate ( 0% cocoa) so I can thin it out. But how much to use?

Starting with three quarters of my 3.5 ounce bar of 72% and adding X amount of white chocolate to get 60% when melted together:
0.72*(3/4*3.5 oz) + 0*(X oz) = 0.6*(3/4*3.5 oz + X oz)
0.72*(2.625 oz) = 0.6*(2.625 oz + X oz)
1.89 oz = 1.575 oz + 0.6*X oz
0.315 oz = 0.6*X oz
0.525 oz = X oz

Stay in school, kids!

On to the actual swirling. After churning the ice cream, I packed it into a medium baking dish and let it ripen in the freezer for an hour to get it good and firm. Then I brought it out into a well-air-conditioned room and drizzled on spoonfuls of the caramel and the chocolate. I really wanted to use plastic squeezy bottles but I couldn't find any. The caramel stayed liquid, but the chocolate solidified on contact. It was pretty cool--like I was using one of those fancy anti-griddles. I can see why the avant garde chefs like them so much.

Once I had the top covered, I scraped it off, packed into a storage container, drizzled the top of that, drizzled the new surface in the baking dish, packed that and so on. I don't think the caramel stayed in strings, but at least it'll be unevenly distributed. The end result wasn't packed all that well since I didn't want to break up the stracciatella too much.

And here's the result. The ice cream is light and maybe a bit fluffy. (I'd have preferred creamy, really.) The caramel is pleasantly oozy. The chocolate crackles enticingly as you carve out a scoopful and crunches between the teeth. The mixture of textures is great but the banana flavor is too pronounced. I'm going to blame the corn syrup here. I think maybe it would be best to leave out the banana entirely and just go with straight vanilla and let the caramel and chocolate carry the load.

Chocolate-banana-toasted coconut ice cream

I've been thinking that we lucked out that bananas were the fruit with the magical custard-substituting powers. Bananas go with so many different flavors they make a wide variety of reduced fat ice cream flavors possible. If it were, say, grapes, what could you do with them?

That's all to say that I'm still ringing the changes on banana ice cream although, after going through a variety of different fruits, honey, peanut butter, white and now dark chocolate, I'm just about out of standard pairings. I've got at least one more novel idea, but unless I think of more, or find a less calorie- and fat-conscious audience, I'm going to be sticking to lighter fare hereafter.

But there's still today's chocolate banana toasted coconut ice cream. I've got no real story as to the origin of the recipe; It's really using up the leftover cream and coconut milk I had along with some shredded coconut that I bought for an Indian recipe I never made because my curry leaves faded before I got the chance.

Here's what I did:

1 1/2 cups unsweetened shredded coconut
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup milk
3/4 ounce (by weight) dutch-processed cocoa
1/4 cup Splenda blend or 1/2 cup sugar
a few pinches more of sugar, don't use Splenda for this
1 frozen and defrosted banana
1/4 cup cocoa nibs (have I talked about cocoa nibs? Good stuff. They're what you get if you stop making chocolate halfway through the process. Take Cocoa beans and clean, ferment, roast, shell and crack them to get nibs. Crush the nibs into a liquid, maybe add a bit extra cocoa butter, add sugar and maybe milk, temper the results and you've got chocolate. Nibs give you a nice crunch and a dark chocolate flavor and they're good for baking and freezing.)

1. Spread 3/4 cup coconut in a single layer on a cookie sheet. Toast in 350 degree oven until golden brown. This should take only a few minutes. Watch closely as they burn quickly.

2. Spread the remaining coconut on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with a few pinches of sugar. Toast until golden brown. It won't be in the oven long enough to fully melt the sugar into a glaze, but it will melt enough to stick to the coconut. Put this batch of toasted coconut into a freezable container and put into the freezer. When it's been fully chilled, it will become brittle. Crush the coconut into pieces of whatever size you'd like. I left mine about a half-inch across.

3. In a medium pot bring cream, milk and coconut milk to a boil. Add the unsweetened toasted coconut, turn the heat down to low and let simmer for ten minutes. (Normally for an infusion I'd turn the heat entirely off, but simmering coconut milk long enough can cause it to caramelize and I was hoping to get some of that flavor into the ice cream as well.

4. Take the cream mixture off the heat. Fish the toasted coconut out and whisk in the sugar and cocoa. Don't worry if the cocoa won't entirely dissolve.

5. Either put the cream mixture and the banana into a blender or add the banana to the pot and use a stick blender. Blend until smooth.

6. Pour into a suitable container and chill to 40 degrees. Churn. Just before ice cream is ready to remove from the churn sprinkle in the reserved toasted coconut and the cocoa nibs and allow the churn to mix them in. Or do it by hand after removing the ice cream from the churn.

7. Ripen in the freezer for at least two hours.


And here's what I got: (Sorry, that picture looked a lot clearer when it was still in my phone.)



I've got to admit, I'm a little disappointed in the results. Oh, on the whole it's just fine but the details still matter. The ice cream itself froze quite solidly (and it bugs me that I still can't predict what texture I'm going to get) but has a nice smooth texture when it warms up. I used a bit too much cocoa as the chocolate flavor pushes the coconut infusion and banana into the background. If you're going to have imbalanced flavors, you can do worse than having over-strong chocolate, but I was hoping for better. The faint coconut flavor is definitely toasted coconut so that's nice, though. The real problem was the nicely crisp toasted coconut shards reverted to the raw texture. As the ice cream melts away you end up with a mouthful of coconut and nibs; I wanted both to be crunchy but instead you have to chew for a while and bits get stuck between your teeth. Coworkers more fond of coconut than I am liked it so it's good for what it is but I was aiming to overcome my a priori anti-coconut bias and I didn't beat the spread.

Next time I'll have to try a stronger infusion and skip the mix in. And maybe add some almonds. That should work.

Chocolate plus stuff that has no business being in chocolate

A new Whole Foods location opened up near my work recently and, while it didn't have much that will make me switch from the grocery-shopping ruts I've already dug, it did stock a couple of chocolate bars I've been looking for for a while now.













In case you can't read the small print there, that's white chocolate with kalamata olives and milk chocolate with bacon, both from Vosges. It's interesting to see these sorts of exotic combinations moving out of experimental chefs' kitchens and into supermarkets. Vosges and Whole Foods are both sufficiently upscale and exorbitantly priced that I don't think the existence of these bars spells the death of the trend. But I can buy Frey white chocolate with cinnamon and blood orange at Target so the long term outlook is not good. (That the chef who did a bacon ice cream on Next Iron Chef got dressed down by the judges for lack of originality is a pretty bad sign too. Although he was doing a riff on french toast and even I could have come up with that.)

The real problem here is actually how banal both bars taste. The kalamata olives are identifiably that, but in all that white chocolate they taste no more unusual than, say, almonds. The bacon bar was even worse off because it tastes so familiar. Katrina Markoff, Vosges' founder, spells it out on the back of the box: chocolate chip pancake breakfast. I missed the pancake.

It really shouldn't be surprising that these bars weren't very surprising. They both were strong hits of sugar, salt and fat. Everything else was grace notes. (I had to take a shot after trying them to include the fourth food group, alcohol, and complete the experience.) There's still something interesting here, but it's going to have to be more complex. It's got me thinking, anyway.