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.

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.

CSA week seven - Black spaote banana meringue cookies

I had no reason to think this was going to work. My searching didn't turn up any recipes that combined whipped egg whites and fruit pulp which is usually a pretty good indication that it's not a good idea. But I had everything I needed lying around so I thought I'd give it a try just to see what would happen.

Ingredients:
pulp from several small black sapotes
1 banana, frozen and defrosted
1-3 Tablespoons sugar depending on how sweet your fruit is
1 pinch salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
5 Tablespoons whole wheat pastry flour
some agave nectar
2/3 cup egg whites

0. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

1. Blend the fruit. Add the sugar and vanilla and blend some more. Stir in the flour.

2. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks. Stir 1/3 of the egg whites into the fruit mixture to lighten. Fold in the second third. Fold in the third third. Check for sweetness. Fold in agave nectar until the flavors pop.

3. Using a coffee or small ice cream scoop, dispense dollops of batter onto cookie sheets prepared using your most extreme non-stick procedure. Bake for 40 minutes, turning halfway through. Take them out, try one, discover it's raw in the center and put them back in for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

For my second batch I found 25 minutes at 350 degrees worked well, but the hour of sitting around deflated the cookies which may have had some effect so use your best judgement.


I call these cookies, but only because I can't think of a better word for them. They've got the soft squishy/chewy texture of angel's food cake. Actually many are partially pre-squished due to troubles I had getting them off the parchment paper I baked them on.

Fresh out of the oven they were a little crisp around the edges, but that fades. There's still a little crystal-crunch from the sugar which I actually like, but you may want to avoid by using confectioner's sugar.

Despite having substantially more sapote than banana, the flavor is predominantly caramelized banana. The sapote rounds it out, but it could be mistaken for a hint of chocolate. Pretty tasty. Maybe it could use a little acid to brighten it up--a lemon sugar glaze maybe?

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.

Mango chutney ice cream

The title of this post is a bit of a spoiler for the end result. It wasn't my intent to make chutney. I just wanted to cook some mango down to concentrate the flavors, but I had the inspiration to add other elements and went with the impulse.

I started with:
1 large ripe mango, strongly flavored, sweet and low on fiber from the last CSA al-a-carte offering. I don't think Margie specified what variety these are, but they've got great flavor and texture. I ditched a few other mango recipes because I can't stop eating them fresh.

To the chopped mango, I added
2 fingerling bananas, firm and tart, frozen and defrosted. These are also from the CSA. They're unusual, but I don't detect a lot of their flavor in the final dish, so you could probably substitute one small Cavendish.

and
juice of half a lime
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 large pinch salt
2 large pinches cayenne pepper
Salt and cayenne are traditional accompaniments to green mango and not unheard of for ripe. Try a slice of ripe mango with generous pinches of both; it completely transforms the flavor. And that's where I went from mango ice cream to chutney ice cream.

I cooked all that down for a good 15 minutes until I had 1 3/4 cups of richly flavored caramelized goop.

I then added
1 1/2 cups cream

and since it needed to be extra sweet for freezing:
1/4 cup white sugar

and to thin it out a bit
1/4 cup milk, and
2 Tablespoons light rum.
I don't think I've used alcohol in an ice cream before (although I've used it plenty of times in sherbet). With all the other ingredients with textural effects, I can't really say if it helped. Didn't hurt, certainly.

Then I chilled and churned. I deliberately left the fruit mixture a little lumpy to add some texture to the ice cream. They got broken up a bit in the churn and, interestingly, the fibers from the mango accumulated on the dasher to create a bezoar sort of thing. Convenient for it to be automatically removed from the final product.



The texture is beautifully soft and creamy straight from the freezer, but with a bit of solidity to it. It's not chewy but it doesn't melt away to nothing immediately. With each bite you start with a shock of salt, fade into warm rich fruit with a slow fade out to the bite of cayenne. When the ice cream has melted away it leaves sweet little pieces of candied fruit that bring back the fruit flavor in a purer form without the mellowing cream. It's really quite lovely.

What's interesting here is that cooked mango, particularly spiced and salted cooked mango, is so unusual that its identity in here is difficult to pin down. It tastes more like the white sapote ice cream I made than fresh mango, but it doesn't taste quite like that either. I could see mis-identifying it as French vanilla with some obscure fruit mixed in, which is odd as it contains neither vanilla nor eggs. I think I said something similar about one of the dishes at the Mango Brunch at the Fairchild last year. Is it just me?

I'm curious what it might be like with some other more readily recognizable cooked fruit--blueberries or apples, maybe. That'll probably just taste like cobbler with a scoop of ice cream on top. Not that would be a bad thing.

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.

Blueberry banana ice cream

This is just something I threw together without any real plan to use the pint of blueberries getting a little past their prime. I didn't realize until afterward that I was essentially just making a frozen smoothie. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.

2 cups blueberries
1 large banana, frozen and defrosted
1 cup cream
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup light honey
1/4 cup agave nectar [a half cup of one or the other would be fine, I'm sure.]
up to 1/4 cup sugar depending on how sweet your fruit is
dash nutmeg
dash cinnamon
dash vanilla
dash salt

Plus a little more cream to thin it out. No more than 1/4 cup.

and, because they often show up in blueberry banana bread so should taste good here, 1 large handful pecans, toasted and salted.

and, inspired by the chocolate-covered bacon in vanilla gelato Kat made last week, 2 slices good, but not great, bacon fried crisp and crumbled. My goal here was to find a combination of flavors where the bacon was an integrated part of a complex whole, not just framed by the other flavors. That's why I didn't use top quality bacon, large pieces or all that much of it compared to the pecans. I think Kat manages the same trick with the honey ice cream with bacon and dried figs she made this week.



The ice cream's texture could be better. It's a little too firm when fully frozen and melts goopily. You've had a blueberry smoothie so you have a pretty good idea what the ice cream proper, without the mix-ins, is like. The spices aren't readily identifiable, but I think I can taste them doing their job in there supporting the main flavors. But that's in isolation and I deliberately overloaded it with pecans so every bite pairs the sweet, slightly tart fruit and the chew of savory toasty nuts and the (mostly still) crisp bits of smoky bacon. You get a nice cross fade as the ice cream melts away exposing more of the mix-ins to the taste buds. Or you can start chewing right away and blend the flavors. And I think that blend works really well. Go to IHOP and order the blueberry pancakes with bacon and use the pecan syrup and see if you don't agree.

This seems to have gone over a little better than my last bacon ice cream, although that wasn't unpopular. The more subtle use and the better texture I got out of the bacon helped a lot, I think. The next time I do a bacon ice cream, I think I want to move away from breakfast flavor combinations. I wonder if a bacon and blue cheese ice cream could work without going entirely savory. Or bacon and miso. Ah, I see that last has been done. And used in bourbon root beer floats. Can't top that. I'll have to think of something else.

Banana ice cream with stuff in it

said stuff being a peanut butter/honey swirl and graham cracker brittle. A bit long to put all that in the title.

This is a new version of an ice cream I made back in February '08. And part of that recipe I took from Alton Brown:
Banana Ice Cream
3 medium ripe bananas, peeled (a little over 1 pound)
1/2 Tablespoon lemon juice
3/8 cup light corn syrup
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Freeze and defrost the bananas. Mix everything in a blender, chill, churn, ripen and serve.

My innovation was adding habeñero peppers and an attempt at a peanut butter/honey swirl that ended up more as chewy chunks (albeit tasty ones). That turned out fine, but could have done with some improvement and since I was responding to a request for banana ice cream this week, it seemed a good time to look back and see what could be done with it.

First thing was adding some more texture. I was very happy with how the almond brittle worked in the lapsang ice cream I made a while back so I thought that approach would work well. There was already going to be nuts (well, legumes) from the peanut butter so I wanted to make a cookie brittle instead. Nilla Wafers were my first choice, but I had graham crackers in the house for another recipe I'm going to make sooner or later and they'll do fine. When you look up recipes for graham cracker brittle on-line, though, you find some weird cookies that soak the crackers in whole sticks of melted butter before pouring caramel over top. Not what I was looking for. Instead I just crushed up a half cup of crackers, cooked three ounces of sugar to hard crack stage, mixed them together, spread it out flat and, once it hardened, whacked it with my crab hammer into bitty pieces. There: brittle.

For the swirl, I saw honey roasted as an option in the grind-your-own-butter peanut bins at Whole Foods. Half the price of the plain peanuts for some reason so I tried that. It came out crunchy style which wasn't my intention, but was actually a plus as it eventually added some more textural interest to the ice cream. I mixed roughly equal amounts of the peanut butter and a wildflower honey and then, to make sure it would stay liquid, a good dose of vodka. It got gooey in a refrigerator test so in went more vodka and then too much vodka so I had to add more peanut butter and honey to get some flavor back into the mix. And some hot sauce too; what the heck. I wasn't entirely happy with the final result, but the texture seemed to hold up well as it chilled and the alcohol burn tends to fade at freezer temperatures so I figured I'd be OK.

So, once everything was good and cold, I churned up the ice cream mix and as I was scooping it out mixed in handfuls of the brittle and dollops of the swirl. After a night in the freezer, here it is:


I like the clarity of flavor the agave syrup gives the banana ice cream. It's not banana/honey (although that's a fine flavor combination); it doesn't have that industrial tinge corn syrup gives or the deep undertones of molasses; it's just banana. This really cements agave nectar's place in my pantry for the times that I need fructose, but don't want any of those other flavors. Thanks to that fructose, along with the bananas, the texture is nicely smooth and creamy. The bananas make it a bit goopy as it melts but given how much fat their substituting for, that's a minor quibble.

The peanut butter/honey swirl I screwed up a little as I tried to ensure it stayed liquid in the freezer. The vodka thinned out the flavors unevenly so the result tastes of peanut butter first, vodka second and then a little honey. The hot sauce was really completely unnecessary as there was already some burn from the vodka (although not a lot).

The graham cracker brittle is also a little off. The sugar cooked a little too dark and contributes a a touch more flavor to the combination than I wanted. The graham cracker is still easy to recognize but it's pairing with the caramelized sugar and not with the banana, peanut butter and honey that it was supposed to. And if you're not going to get those combinations you kind of lose the point of using graham crackers in the first place.

My last gripe is that I over-swirled the ice cream so you don't get the distinct layers I was hoping for. That said, the mixture is still sufficiently uneven that you get a different balance between banana and peanut butter in each spoonful which is a nice effect. And those flavors are pretty nice. Coming at this without knowing what I had in mind, this is a dandy ice cream and an improvement on last year's model I think.

Bananas foster ice cream with hot spiced caramel

I've entered a cooking contest. Sort of. It's actually the University of Miami's United Way Dessert Extravaganza. Raise money for charity is, at least putatively, the primary goal, but with an expected attendance of around two dozen and a ten dollar admission it seems like a whole lot of bother for not a lot of benefit. My charity dollar goes to Kiva loans so I've ignored the whole workplace-based charity drive so far, but the desserts are to be judged and I have got some pretty good recipes so what the heck.

But what to make? Ice cream is the obvious way to go. Real ice cream. Sorbet may be nice, but low fat doesn't win contests. One of my own recipes of course. Nothing too pricy since I have to make 25 servings. That rules out anything with nuts or out-of-season fruit (which is generally worse than cheaper in-season fruit anyway). And it's got to be not too challenging, but not so straightforward that it doesn't make an impact. And there's going to be free fancy coffees so something that goes well with that. To my mind, that rules out mocha which would otherwise fit the bill. Too matchy matchy, you know?

And definitely something I've made before so I know what I'm doing. The particular recipe I settled on is one I made before starting the blog that went over quite well at the time. I've mentioned it as part of another post early but it hasn't had a full write up so I'll go over the details now.

It's based on a Lebovitz roasted-banana ice cream recipe but crossed with Good Eats recipe for bananas foster and modified a bit beyond to make sure it works right. It's kind of beige on its own so I decided to add the caramel swirl from the last ice cream with a bit of spice repurposed as a hot topping. I've been shopping around for a microwavable squeezy bottle, but I can't find one so I'm going to have to drizzle with a spoon when I serve.

Here's the recipe. I'll post again after the contest.

Bananas Foster Ice Cream

3 medium ripe bananas, peeled
1/3 cup or 70 grams packed brown sugar
1 Tablespoon butter, cut into small pieces
1 1/2 cups whole milk
2 Tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup light rum
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon orange zest

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Slice the bananas into 1/2-inch pieces, toss with brown sugar and butter and lay out on a cookie sheet or baking dish. Bake for 30-40 minutes depending on how spread out the bananas are, stirring once or twice and checking diligently for burning. Remove pan when they are browned, cooked through, and a caramel is just starting to form.

Scrape the bananas, sauce and caramel into a blender or food processor. Add everything else and puree until smooth. Chill in refrigerator to 40 degrees F (overnight is best) and see how thick it is. Mine had solidified into a pudding texture both times and could well have been served just like that. Instead I whisked in another 1/2 cup of milk before churning. Your results will depend on your bananas.

The actual churning takes quite a while since all that rum keeps the mix from solidifying properly. That means you can churn in as much air as you'd like, but I'd keep it under 50% increase in volume or the texture will suffer.


Now, that's how I made it the first time around, but the pictures are from the double batch I'm making now. For the amounts listed above, one baking dish is fine. I actually used a slightly larger one and ended up with well-separated banana slices interspersed with thickening puddles of sugar syrup. This time, the baking dish was filled with baked-out banana juices and I had to cook twice as long to get things even close to a proper caramel. The results don't really have the texture or flavor of the recipe properly made. Unfortunately, I didn't really accept this until after the ice cream had ripened and I found that the prominent flavors were bitter nutmeg and rum. I'm melting it down to add more sugar so it's presentable which is all I can hope for at this point.

I think I'll post this now and let you know whether the salvage job worked after the contest. A bit of suspense keeps up the readership.

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.

Grand Slam Ice Cream

so-called because it contains a cup of coffee, a glass of milk, a waffle with maple syrup and banana, two eggs and three slices of bacon--all the components (more or less) of a Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast.

You knew as well as I that I was going to make a bacon ice cream sooner or later. Straight bacon ice cream is pretty passe these days; it was over a year ago that Michael Symon got dinged for making it during the Next Iron Chef competition. If you look around on-line you see variations like maple-bacon, coffee-bacon, peanut butter-bacon and the like so that next step beyond is well trodden. I needed not just a more complex flavor but some grander idea to make it worth while and so a complete breakfast ice cream was born.

The first thing was to infuse the coffee. I coarsely ground three Tablespoons of coffee beans and added them to 1 cup heavy cream and 1 1/2 cup milk. I slowly heated that to the edge of simmering and then turned off the heat, put on the lid and let it sit for 15 minutes. Not quite boiling means that I don't release the more bitter flavor components in the coffee and get a smoother flavor.

After it was done steeping I strained out the coffee grounds, pressing them to get out all the liquid, and split the dairy into two batches. I wanted to thicken it both with (two) egg yolks and (one) banana but I don't know what it is in the banana that mimics a custard I don't know if it would survive heating and I'm sure that the protein chains that egg yolks thicken with won't survive a spin in the blender. That means two separate operations to be mixed later.

First one's easy, 1 cup dairy plus one frozen-and-defrosted banana blended together.

For the second one I whisked the two egg yolks with 5 fluid ounces of grade A dark amber maple syrup. That amount was determined by what I had on hand but it worked out so I'll leave it as is. Grade A dark is actually an average as I have a bunch of sample bottles of different grades and I mixed some grade B, some grade A dark and the dregs of my big bottle of grade A medium. Once that was smooth I mixed it with 1 1/2 cups of dairy and slowly heated it to 170 degrees whisking frequently to create a custard. I immediately removed it from the pan and cooled for a half hour and mixed it with the banana blend. I noticed that it tasted really good warm which meant it wasn't sweet enough for freezing. So I added a quarter cup of white sugar before chilling it overnight to 40 degrees.

Meanwhile, it was time to cook the bacon. That's three strips for the ice cream and one for me. I preferred method is baking in my toaster oven. Ten minutes at 350 degrees, give the strips a flip, another ten minutes and maybe a bit longer depending on how they're doing. This particularly bacon is thick cut--the extra-nice, extra-fancy, extra-expensive sort from Whole Foods. It's great and I'm never going back to the supermarket stuff--so it took an extra five minutes and maybe could have cooked a bit longer to get really crisp, but I didn't figure it would stay crisp in the ice cream so I didn't want to take the risk of burning it. If it wasn't going into something sweet I would have sprinkled it with brown sugar which candies the bacon up nicely and very tastily.

I also chopped up a frozen waffle. Even if I had a waffle maker I probably would have gone with store bought as I expect they're well-designed for freezing. I used Van's whole-grain Belgian waffles which have a good bit of flavor and a firm texture that Eggo doesn't deliver.

In the morning the mix wasn't noticeably thick, but it did heavily coat a dipped spatula which is what you're looking for in an ice cream mix.

It churned up nicely with a good gradual freezing and a slowly thickening texture. That allows plenty of time for churned in air which helps keep the results from freezing too solidly. I mixed in the bacon and waffle as I spooned out the churned ice cream. No point in pouring the solid bits into the churn where they can get ground up and jam the works. And then into the freezer for ripening.


And here's the final product. Bacon entirely aside, the coffee/maple/banana combination is fabulous. Even my co-workers who picked out the bacon raved about the ice cream. There was a nice synergy of the three flavors straight out of the churn, but after ripening coffee has come to the forefront with the others rounding it out. If you make it, I'd suggest using only two scoops of coffee beans or just mashing up the beans in a mortar instead of grinding them.

There's enough bacon and waffle to get one or the other in most bites. If you get the bacon there are hints of salt and smoke poking through the intense but mellow flavor of the ice cream--which actually works quite well. The ice cream melts away rapidly without much lingering aftertaste so you're left just chewing a piece of really good bacon and/or a not-bad-at-all chunk of whole-grain waffle. The few seconds of overlap as the flavors build and fade in intensity are the best part.

The texture is about as good as I've ever managed: soft, smooth and creamy. I think that's from the fructose in the maple syrup. I could see the mix getting gooey as it froze in the churn instead of just hardening up. The texture of the waffles isn't great--a bit stiff and crumbly--but it's a good contrast and the flavor blooms as you chew it so not too bad. I was afraid it would get soggy, but I think the hearty multigraininess helped avoid that Eggo-esque possibility. Surprisingly, the bacon retains a bit of crunch around the edges with a nice chewy center. There was some concern expressed that an unnamed "some people" might not like the chewiness. Maybe I could have cooked the bacon crisper, but with thick-cut bacon there's a fine line between crisp and burnt and you start to lose flavor as you approach it. Now that I know that bacon retains its texture when mixed in ice cream, I'll probably go with thinner, crisper bacon next time it's an appropriate addition.

Overall, a great success but not a terribly surprising one. Of course all these flavors go together; I'm just presenting them unusually. I think that's a bit less impressive than novel flavor combinations that work out. That's what I'll have to work on next.