Roasted strawberry banana ice cream

I had been thinking of making roasted strawberry beet ice cream, but, as I've actually been craving ice cream recently, I decided to go a route with a higher chance of creating something actually palatable.

I started by cleaning a pint of strawberries and cutting them into equally-sized small pieces. I added two medium bananas, sliced in half and roughly chopped, tossed them in a Tablespoon or two of demerara sugar, [For those unfamiliar, demerara sugar is essentially old-fashioned brown sugar. Modern brown sugar is made by returning some molasses to refined sugar. Demerara is made by leaving the molasses in.] and roasted at 375 degrees for 1 hour, with one stir in the middle.

I used a fairly large pan and a fairly high temperature to make sure the juices would evaporate. The point here is to concentrate the flavors into a smaller volume so the final ice cream will pack more punch per spoonful.

I blended the results with:

1/2 cup demerara sugar

1 pinch salt

juice from 1/2 lime

2 Tablespoon rum

2 teaspoons vanilla, and

1 1/2 cups cream.

Without the juice to thin the cream out, the result was rather thicker at this stage than the other fruit ice creams mixtures I've made. To compensate, I added 3/4 cup milk.

I was happy with the texture then, but it thickened up in the refrigerator overnight and it didn't seem quite sweet enough at that temperature. So, to thin it some more and adjust the sweetness back up without modifying the flavor balance too much, I added 1/4 cup agave nectar.

That all went into the churn. My kitchen was hotter than I would have liked which have have affected the thickening, but the alcohol and fructose worked against that too. Either way, it was rather softer than I would have preferred when I ran out of cold 25 minutes into churning and it wasn't able to hold on to a lot of churned in air, so it's kind of dense. Well, it'll have to do.

Since I had some on hand, I swirled in some Hershey's strawberry syrup. It's 100% artificial so it the flavor is less Strawberry than it is just Pink, really, so there's some contrast with the ice cream.

Here it is after ripening:

The texture is a little dense, but not hard even straight out of the freezer. If you're not going to have super-premium fat levels, denseness is a good second choice texturewise. I should have blended the mixture either a little more or a little less as there is the occasional tiny bit of fruit or maybe it's a little curdling from the citric acid in the cream. It's a minor unpleasantness. Roasting the fruit let me replace a lot of water with cream so it's richer than other fruit ice creams I've made and the tendency towards crystalization seems to be lower.

Straight out of the freezer the tart berry flavor really pops. After letting the ice cream soften a little, a more rounded fruit flavor emerges. The strawberry syrup brings the berry out above the banana a little bit. The result is reminiscent of the good quality strawberry syrup with pieces of fruit in it you get in ice cream parlors. And that inspired me to add chocolate syrup which creates a passable approximation to a banana split. If I had known it was going to work out that way, I would have roasted some pineapple too and added some candied walnuts. But it's just dandy as is.

CSA week ten - strawberry honey basil ice cream

Not too enormously innovative of a flavor this time around. You get a couple pages of results if you Google for strawberry basil ice cream before you start to hit the sorbets. Adding honey seems to be an unusual twist, though, and I think it adds something.

Ingredients:
1 pound strawberries, cleaned, hulled and chopped or sliced
8 ounces by volume (about 10 ounces by weight) modestly well-flavored honey, wildflower or generic supermarket honey would work fine
1 pinch salt
2 Tablespoons vodka
2 cups cream
2 small handfuls fresh basil leaves, bruised
2 teaspoons dried basil leaves, also roughed up a little
up to 1/4 cup sugar

1. Combine the strawberries, honey, salt and vodka in a medium bowl and let macerate 1 hour at room temperature or longer in the refrigerator. What with the honey, it's hard to tell when the berries released their juices so judge by when they soften. Move strawberry mixture to a blender and blend until only slightly chunky. [Now that I think about it, there's no reason you couldn't macerate in the blender container. You should do that.] Remove to the lidded container you'll be cooling the ice cream mix in.

2. Combine the cream with 1 handful of fresh basil and the dried basil. Bring to a boil and gently simmer for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit for 15 minutes. [Normally I cover the pot at this stage, but I want to reduce the cream a little so let it evaporate. Break the skin that forms on top to let the steam out.]

3. Strain the cream into a blender and discard the used basil. Add the second handful of basil to the cream and blend until the cream turns green and the specks of intact basil are quite small. [I also added an egg yolk at this point since I had a spare handy. I didn't bother to reheat the cream so it would have a thickening effect so it just added a bit of richness.] Add to the strawberry mixture and combine.

4. Chill overnight, adjust sweetness by adding sugar if necessary, churn [this recipe makes a lot so I churned in two small batches. Neither got too very solid. The vodka and all that fructose keeps it soft.], ripen and serve.


As I said up top, strawberries and basil are a well-known combination so it's no surprise that they make for a nice ice cream. I managed to get a lot of basil flavor into the cream so it's well balanced with the strawberries, tempering their sweetness with herbal flowery notes and a slight bitterness. The honey is less prominent, coming out more as the ice cream melts, but it rounds out the combined berry-basil flavor. One person who tried it likened the result to guava; I could see that.

The texture isn't as creamy as some ice creams I've made, but pretty good considering that it's half fruit.

CSA week three - grapefruit-passionfruit sorbet

No story here, just an idea I had.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups grapefruit, fruit extracted from various membranes
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp and seeds
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon honey
1 sizable squeeze lime
1 Tablespoon vodka
2 pinches salt
1/4 teaspoon tandori spice (coriander, ginger and cardamom mostly. Some garlic, cumin and paprika in there too)

1. Extract the grapefruit meat, removing the membranes and seeds.

2. Heat the water and sugar until the sugar dissolves. Add to the grapefruit and blend.

3. Add the passionfruit and everything else. Mix well, chill, churn and freeze.

You'll have noticed one unusual item in the ingredient list. I knew I wanted something to cut the grapefruit's bitterness beyond just more sugar and, while I was looking through the spice cabinet, the tandori spice mix presented itself.


In the final flavor mix it comes off less tandori and more spice cake and acts as a rich undertone to the sweet, sour and bitter notes of the fruit. It's distinctly separate so it doesn't temper the bitterness quite as I had hoped (the flavors blended better when the mixture was warm). The passionfruit does tone the grapefruit down a bit, though, rounding out the fruit flavors. It adds some really interesting mottling in color, texture and even flavor as the two fruits never quite fully broke up or blended together.

It's an unusual mixture of flavors that, I think, works. It isn't synergistic into some crowd-pleasing form, though; nobody's going to eat a big bowlful and come back for seconds, but I think folks will finish that first bowl. I'll add an addendum once I've found someone else to try it.

Persimmon honey ice cream

This is the first time I've cooked with persimmon and I knew very little about them. I did know (from a comment on a blog post last year) that they are close cousins of black sapotes so, after I got them at the fruit stand at the UM market I knew to let them get very soft and ripe before using them. I looked around for recipes and found a lot for baked persimmon puddings most of which included more sugar than fruit. I didn't want to go quite that route, but that did tell me that cooking the fruit was a standard preparation. The last time I tried to cook down a batch of black sapote I ended up ruining a pot; this has a similar texture so I wanted to add a little insurance by using honey instead of sugar. Plus the persimmons I had were mild enough that they needed a little flavor boost.

This is what I came up with:

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cup persimmon goop
1/2 cup very ripe (or frozen and defrosted) banana
2/3 cup honey
1 thick slice ginger
1 pinch salt
1 cup cream
a couple squeezes of lemon juice
a few dashes cinammon
a teaspoon or two vanilla
a few drops lavender

1. Put the persimmon, banana, honey, ginger and salt in a medium sauce pan. Cook over medium heat about 15 minutes, stirring regularly, until it's cooked down into a syrupy mixture.

2. Cool a bit. Mix in the cream and season with the other ingredients to taste. (These recipes are hard to write when I don't measure anything.)

3. Chill, churn and ripen.


One issue with fruit ice creams is that you have to balance flavor against texture. Every ounce of cream you add thins out the fruit. Here the texture's not bad, but the fact that there's more fruit than cream is pretty obvious. It's still smooth, it just isn't creamy. There's a subtle distinction there but I think you can tell what I mean from the picture, no? Leaving the compote chunky was a good idea; the variation in flavor, texture and color that gives was pretty nice.

The flavor isn't bold, but it's clearly present and there's a lingering fruit/lavender aftertaste that's quite pleasant. It tastes surprisingly like apple pie (a la mode). That's probably due to the cinnamon and ginger flavors over cooked fruit. I sort of regret adding so much that the persimmon doesn't come through clearly as itself--its flavor is well-blended with the honey and lavender--but it did need the help. Folks who've tried it have liked it, but nobody's fighting for seconds. That's probably because of the lack of creaminess and the flavors of a fruit they've never had before. I think I'll make a version of this with black sapote (and some different other flavor components) once we start getting that in the CSA shares.

Mamey sapote ice cream

I've made mamey ice cream a couple times before, but I tried something a little different this time around.

In earlier ice cream recipes, I've seen a big difference in batches made with raw and cooked fruit. Mango had a particularly profound transformation in flavor making an entirely different ice cream. Cooked recipes with mamey are rarer than with mango, but not entirely unheard of. I've never tried one so I was curious to give it a try.

Here's the sapote I used. According to the guy at the market stand, it's one of the last of the summer mamey crop and a different variety than get in the winter. More fibrous for one thing. No huge difference in flavor though, if I'm remembering right over the months. I didn't get many details from him so if you know something about this, do please share in the comments.

I started by scooping out a couple cups worth of pulp, mashing it up with a half cup of sugar and put it over a low heat to cook. I, thoughtlessly, expected it to break down like mangoes do on the stove-top; I should have known it would have a texture more like sweet potato. It took a lot of attention to keep it cooking without burning, but over ten minutes or so it turned into a paste and developed a bit of a caramelized smell.

I didn't want to risk burning it went out of the pot and into the blender with:
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
1 Tablespoon cream cheese (which seems to help scoopability)
the juice of 1 lime
2 teaspoons vanilla, and
a few dashes cinnamon

But it was too thick to blend properly so it definitely needed thinning down. I added another half cup cream, a quarter cup of a tropical juice blend and a couple Tablespoons of agave nectar which does a good job of bringing out fruity flavors along with bolstering the sweetness.Finally, I wanted to add some alcohol to keep it from freezing solid. I'm out of vodka and rum which would have been my first choices, but found that the flavor of dry sake and mamey go really well together. (There's a pretty good cocktail in that combination for those interested in experimenting in that area.) I just added 2 Tablespoons to complete the recipe and gave it a serious blending.

After all that, the mix was still pretty thick, but I was pretty sure I'd added enough alcohol and fructose to keep it from thickening up too much further and my churn's got a relatively powerful motor so I was in good shape as long as I kept an eye on it.

Here it is right out of the churn:




and here it is after ripening in the freezer:

It did freeze up a bit more solid than I would have liked, but it is nearly 50 percent fruit so that's bound to happen.

Despite all the tweaking, the mamey flavor is clear, but in a mellow ice-cream-flavoring way instead of a fruit smoothie in-your-face way. There's an vapory hint of sake in the aftertaste which cuts the starchy throat-coating effect blended mamey can have so that's nice. The texture came out dense, but easily scoopable straight from the freezer (at least from the work freezer which is a bit warmer than my home freezer) and nicely smooth if not exactly creamy (despite all that cream in there). There's no hint of the fibers from the original fruit and just a little of the typical mamey grit.

So did cooking down the mamey make any difference? A bit in the texture I think, but it was a real disappointment that it didn't seem to change the flavor at all. There's probably some interesting bio-chemical reason for that. Non-volatility of the flavor compounds or some such. But the upshot is that this ice cream is pleasant enough, but nothing to get exercised about and a disappointment only so far as the new flavor territory I delved into is indistinguishable from the old.

Fried banana sesame ice cream

If you look at the full list of ice cream flavors I've made, you'll find a whole lot of variations on banana. Mainly that's because bananas are a low-fat alternative to eggs to the recipes, but also because of how versatile their flavor is. I ran out of ideas in this area a while ago, but with the bunch of bananas in the buying club share, I'm back working that vein. Here's one I'm surprised I didn't think of earlier; This flavor is a play on Malaysian banana fritters. Those are bananas dipped in a rice flour batter, deep fried, sometimes candied, but always garnished with lots of sesame seeds. The key elements I wanted to include were the cooked bananas, a bit of the caramel flavor of the candying and the sesame. Here's what I came up with:
1 generous pound bananas, frozen
2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tablespoons agave nectar
1 large pinch salt
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
1 1/2 cups heavy cream (more or less. Adjust to get a thick, but not soft-serve texture)
2 Tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

The first step was to sear the bananas. Since they've been frozen, they're going to dissolve to mush pretty quickly. That means I'm only going to be able to get color on one side. To help that out, I sliced the bananas lengthwise to get a flat side and sprinkled a little sugar on it. It only took maybe 30 seconds in a very hot cast iron pan. There is some burnt sugar bitterness, but a generous pinch of salt works to cut that down.

I found the pan roasted bananas mixed with that pinch of salt, 1/3 cup sugar, a squeeze of agave nectar and 1 teaspoon of sesame oil gave me the flavor I'm aiming at in the final dish. The sweetness is at a natural ripe-banana level and the sesame and banana flavors are beautifully blended with the toastiness adding dimension to the cooked banana's caramelly tropical sweetness.

But flavors shift when you thin a mixture out with heavy cream and chill it down and I need to figure out how to shift them back. I think the sesame flavor won't vary with temperature so I only need to double that amount. But I need to lay on more sugar to compensate for the dampened sweetness at low temperatures. I also need to add the lemon juice to keep the bananas from browning. I'm not thrilled with the extra acidity unbalancing my flavors, but I think it'll be less prominent frozen.

After ten hours in the refrigerator it was ready for churning, but could use a little more sweetness and a little sesame so I added another squirt of agave nectar and another teaspoon of sesame oil along with the toasted sesame seeds.

The mix didn't harden up on the sides of the bucket during churning so the process went slowly and allowed a lot of air to be churned in. That meant that the churning process was limited by overflow instead of thickening up as far as I would have liked. On the other hand, the churned up matrix was pretty stable, showing little signs of melting as I packed it into a container for freezing.

After ripening here's the final result:

It's got that typical banana ice cream texture where it's a bit fluffy and melts suspiciously slowly, but otherwise it's pleasantly creamy and scoopable even if it hasn't got that ultra-premium richness. The crunchy sesame seeds add a little interest. I think I got the flavors back to where I wanted them. It doesn't have the intensity, of course, what with it being half cream, but the balance is right and the banana flavor flows smoothly into the sesame. I thought maybe I'd top it with a drizzle of sesame oil, but that would have been too much. It's good right where it is. What I might do, if I were going to make this again, is fry up some bits of rice-flour-batter to mix in to complete the set of banana fritter flavors. They'd probably get soggy quick, though. They might be nice to serve on top hot from the fryer, though. Yeah, that would work.

Five-spice vanilla ice cream

I made two batches of ice cream for a going-away party at work yesterday. My freezer is still packed full so I had to bring my churn in, make them there and serve them soft. It's kind of a pain to haul the equipment around, but it also let me simplify the recipes because I don't have to worry about the texture once they ripen up in the freezer. In this case, that just meant I didn't bother with the corn starch. To be honest, I'm not sure how much effect the corn starch has on the final texture, but I do know that leaving it out takes all of the cooking out of the recipes. If there's a step to skip, that's the one.

The original plan was to keep it simple--just make vanilla and strawberry--but inspiration struck and what was I supposed to do other than follow my muse?

For the strawberry, the results were fine, but not as interesting as I hoped. That recipe was:
1 14 ounce can coconut milk
1 pint strawberries
2/3 cup sugar
1 pinch salt
1 1/2 ounces cream cheese
Hershey's strawberry syrup to taste.


I would have prefered to use real strawberry syrup, but I haven't got any left. The hope there was to boost the complexity of the strawberry flavors by including both cooked and raw (or in this case artificial and real) versions. I was also hoping the coconut milk would add some extra interest. Nope, it just tasted like strawberry ice cream. Nothing wrong with that I suppose; people liked it.

The mutated vanilla ice cream, though, was pretty fabulous. That's the root beer float flavor in the title. That recipe was:
1 14 ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1 cup cream
1 1/2 ounces cream cheese
1 Tablespoon vanilla paste
1 pinch salt
1 big pinch five spice powder

Five spice powder, if you don't have it memorized or a bottle nearby to check, is made of cinnamon, fennel, cloves, star anise and white pepper. I just did a search and found a handful of recipes that pair it with vanilla for sweet applications including some ice creams, but I think I'm the only one to also use condensed milk which really made this recipe really work well. Other than the pepper, the spices in five spice all have sweet uses. Marrying them with the vanilla the caramel notes from the condensed milk and the cream comes up with something pretty close to a root beer float--accessibly tasty but hard to pin down and with an interesting burn in the aftertaste. A lot of the odder flavors I make are interesting novelties, but this one's a keeper. You've got all those ingredients in the house; try it.

CSA week 13 - Strawberry lavender ice cream

This ice cream was supposed to have a lot more flavor notes in it, as you can see from the list of ingredients, but at the end it was just the strawberries and four tiny drops of lavender extract that come through. Not that anyone was complaining, mind you. This is based on a more straightforward strawberry ice cream from Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop book.

Ingredients:
1 pint strawberries
1 banana, frozen and defrosted
1/2 cup chopped mango
1/2 cup plus a bit more sugar
1 Tablespoon vodka
1/2 cup Possum Trot cas guava and passion fruit sauce [There was plenty leftover after the Potato Pandemonium dinner and Robert let us pack some up doggie bags. It was very nice with buckwheat crêpes, but I thought it freeze up well too so I threw it in. And the chopped mango that was floating in it too.]
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup cream
1 squeeze lemon
4 drops lavender extract
1 pinch of salt

I cleaned and sliced the strawberries and put them in a bowl with the banana, the sugar and the vodka and set it out on the counter for an hour to macerate. I blended the bowl of fruit with the rest of the ingredients in the food processor until the fruit was in little flecks but not completely pulped. I checked for sweetness and drizzled in a Tablespoon or two of agave nectar to bring it up to par.

Then I chilled it in the refrigerator overnight and churned. Unlike a lot of other ice creams I've made recently, this one just wouldn't harden up. After 20 minutes it was starting to overflow the churn and it had reached about a soft serve consistency (which is when you're supposed to be removing ice cream from the churn anyway) so I got it out then.


The texture is very soft and creamy right out of the freezer and a little lighter than usual from the extra air churned in. It's a remarkable texture from an ice cream without a custard or corn starch. There isn't enough banana in there to account for it, but I think the vodka and the fructose in the agave nectar help too. The ice cream melts away in the mouth pretty quickly, like a bargain over churned ice cream, but it coats the mouth the way premium ice creams do. Kind of an odd combination of sensations. The coating carries a lot of flavor so it's still there when you're chewing on the little bits of strawberry and mango.

Because there's only half the strawberries you'd find in a batch of proper strawberry ice cream this size, the flavor is balanced with the slightly tangy cream and the aromatic lavender. Luckily, unlike my last attempt, the light touch with the lavender leaves it floral, not chemical, and it enhances the berry flavor in a lovely way.

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. Now I know you can't reproduce the recipe as written without access to leftover Possum Trot cas guava and passion fruit sauce, but a little more sour cream and a little more mango or guava should substitute in well enough, I think. It was a big hit around the office so, if you've got the strawberries and the ice cream churn, you really ought to consider giving it a try.

CSA week ten - White chocolate tangerine ice cream

[I accidentally posted this yesterday with last Wednesday's date on it so I think people might have missed it. I'm sending it off again with today's date. I apologize if it turns up in the RSS feed twice.]

I say "tangerine", but really I used the sour oranges too and threw in a carambola. All in an attempt to get some fruit flavor to come through, but all our fruit, while sweet and juicy, didn't have a lot of character so I wasn't entirely successful. Infusing the cream with flavor from the zest would have helped but I didn't trust the white specks that were starting to appear on the skins of my fruit. Plus the fruit was getting mushy so zesting would have been difficult. Still, there's a basis here to work on.

Ingredients:
Juice of 2 sour oranges
Juice of 2 ponkan tangerines
Juice of 1 carambola
4 ounces white chocolate
2 cups cream
1 centimeter knob of ginger, finely grated
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 ounces cream cheese

I didn't want to apply any heat to the juice so I forwent the cornstarch part of the Jeni Britton formula. I figured the white chocolate should help with creaminess so it shouldn't be missed too badly.

I juiced the oranges and tangerines, whisked in the cream cheese and vanilla and set aside.

In a microwavable bowl I mixed the white chocolate, sugar, ginger and a half cup of cream. I microwaved it for 15 seconds at a time, stirring in between, just until the chocolate and sugar were fully dissolved. Then I added that to the juices. After a taste I decided it wasn't fruity enough so I squeezed in a carambola. That chilled and the next day I churned.

Part way through churning I found that the fruit flavor and the sweetness had both receded further so I poured in some agave nectar which helped a bit. I should have squeezed in a lemon too. By the way, did you know that agave nectar would be more properly called high fructose agave syrup? Came as a surprise to me. But I don't suppose the fact that it's an industrial product makes it any better or worse than corn syrup or honey. Fructose is fructose wherever it comes from.



The texture is creamy, but firm improving when I leave it out of the freezer for five minutes. It melts away to nothing quite rapidly like ice milk, which, on average, it sort of is, I suppose.

The flavor isn't as citrusy as I would have liked, but that's the mildly-flavored fruits I had to work with. Overall, it's is pleasant but undistinguished, vaguely identifiable as orange or tangerine and white chocolate but without any tartness to bring it to life.

I've taken it around and it's not getting an enthusiastic response. That's fair; I'm not entirely enthusiastic myself. With the citrus not popping, the flavor combination is kind of weird. I'm going to bring in a lemon tomorrow and see what it's like if I squeeze a little over top. In the meantime, a little honey's a nice addition.

OK, it's tomorrow and I can confirm that a little squeeze of meyer lemon does perk things up nicely. I'm going to take it around with my lemon to see if I get a better reception. ... Those who tried both slightly preferred it with honey. It's sweeter for one, plus the drizzle of honey is a very nice presentation. Maybe using both is worth trying.

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.

tropical fruit salad ice cream

The centerpiece of this ice cream was supposed to fruit salad fruit a.k.a. ceriman, a.k.a. Monstera deliciosa fruit. This is yet another tropical fruit grown locally and unknown in more temperate climes. I neglected to take an establishing shot of the one I got from Sawmill Farm in the summer CSA offering so here's a copyright free image I ganked from Wikipedia.

You can't really tell because of the lighting, but it's covered with hexagonal scales. That's an unripe fruit where they're all securely covering the fruit inside. As it ripens, starting at the stem end, rows of scales loosen and fall off revealing arrays of kernels of fruit looking very much like a corncob.

The kernels themselves also come loose from a central hub as they ripen. You can see the black nasty crud that comes with them in this photo. You can also probably see some variation in the fruit kernels there. There's a wave of ripeness that progresses down the fruit. The rows that came off easily were ripe, the ones in the top row you can see are nearly there and the one below isn't quite yet.

That's all pretty cool, I think. The difficulty comes in the fact that underripe ceriman, like a fair number of other non-commerialized tropical fruits we can get locally, is toxic. Even slightly underripe bits cause an hour of burning and swelling in the mouth and throat and a rather upset stomach. (A word of warning in the CSA information would have been appreciated, Margie.) And the ripe fruit, since it's exposed, goes to rot and drawing ants pretty darn quick.

No doubt that's a pretty efficient way for this fruit to propogate the species, but it's dicey for personal consumption and nothing I'm willing to risk serving anyone else. And that's a shame since it tastes really good. The flavor somewhere between pineapple and banana and, when ripe, quite sweet. (I actually liked it better slightly underripe. For the first few seconds, anyway.) You can see how it got the name 'fruit salad fruit'. How it got the name 'Swiss cheese fruit' is less obvious until you see the holes in the plant's leaves.

So that went into the trash. But I still had some leftover mamey sapote, a pile of passion fruit and some fingerling bananas so I could cobble something together. I ended up with:

1/4 mamey sapote (maybe half a cup)
2 fingerling bananas, frozen and defrosted (about as much as one medium Cavendish)
1 14 ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1 cup cream
pulp and seeds of seven passion fruits (no more than a third of a cup)
2 teaspoons vanilla paste
pinch salt
1/2 cup or so Dole piña colada juice cocktail to thin the mix out


I was torn over using the condensed milk or coconut milk. My instincts said coconut milk would work better, but you see condensed milk paired with mameys and passion fruit in a lot of recipes so I thought I'd give it a try. I know that pairing comes more from lack of refrigeration than from deep culinary thoughtfulness, but I've got a good idea how it would taste with coconut milk and I didn't have a sense how it would work with condensed milk and I wanted to find out.

Not much procedure in making the ice cream mix. The mamey and bananas went into a blender with the dairy and I mixed in the rest by hand.

I found the easiest way to harvest the passion fruit pulp was to slice a disc (not the correct geometric term but I'm having trouble finding the right one) out of the side of a fruit and then dig out the pulp with a teaspoon. Slice the fruit entirely in half and you can just scrape it out, but you may well make a mess if the pulp isn't firmly attached to the rind.

And I might mention that this is my first time using vanilla paste which is vanilla extract mixed with sugar, water and a little bit of vanilla bean pulp and seeds. The flavor seems somewhat richer and I do like the visual effect of the little specks of vanilla distributed through the ice cream. But the added sugar has to be compensated for in recipes and I wouldn't want to use it in savory dishes (for which vanilla seems to be an in thing right now). I guess I ought to keep both paste and extract on hand. And some whole beans too if I can find some at a reasonable price.

Anyway, here's the ice cream coming out of the churn. I got a late start on it due to the problems with the ceriman so, since I wanted to make this a Wednesday post, I wasn't able to fully chill either the bucket or the mix and I did the churning in a kitchen hotter than ideal. So still a bit soft when I ran out of cold.

But the end result's not bad looking:


Taking it out of the churn slightly soft means a dense, but still scoopable, creamy final product that melts slowly in the bowl, but quickly on the tongue. Sometimes that's what you're going for; I'm not sure it helps in this particular case. The flavor is a base of condensed milk with the melded flavor of the fruits lightening it up and the vanilla tying them together. That's only if you think hard about it; It's all pretty well blended. It's impossible to pick out the flavors of the individual fruits unless you hit a passionfruit seed which comes coated with a thin layer of brightly flavored passion fruit pulp. That jelly-like texture and the crisp crunch of the seeds are a pleasant contrast once the rich creaminess has faded. If you don't get a seed, the condensed milk flavor outlasts the fruit for a caramelly finish.

I think coconut milk would have given me cleaner flavors, but I do like how the condensed milk's flavor complimented the fruit. Either way is worth trying.