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.

CSA week 11 - White tea/carambola/ginger sorbet

This is a simple sorbet so there's not much to the recipe. I brewed up two cups of strong white tea, mixed in 3/4 cup sugar, chopped and de-seeded one large carambola, grated a teaspoon of fresh ginger with my microplane, put it all in the blender with a Tablespoon of light rum and blended it smooth. Chilled, churned and ripened and here it is:









It's frozen a bit too solidly so it's crumbly, a little hard to scoop. The texture's a bit more Italian ice than a proper sorbet. I should have added more rum.

And the flavor is a bit too sweet--this would have worked better with a tart carambola--but I like the flavor. The fruit, the tea and the spice have merged into something new and unique but naggingly familiar too. It's somewhere in the root beer/cola neighborhood. That's it--it tastes like the root beer flavor of Bottle Caps candy. I think that's a vague resemblance plus the extra sweetness taking it into candy territory.

Mark Bittman has a recipe for broiling cornish hens with a glaze made of powdered red hots, which he created as a take off of Jean-Georges Vongerichten's squab with Jordan almonds. I'll bet poultry coated with ground root beer or cola Bottle Caps would work too. People do cook chicken in cola I'm told. I'm putting this on my to-do list. Not anywhere near the top of my to-do list, but it's going on there somewhere.

Tropical cheesecake ice cream

This isn't quite the ice cream I set out to make. The original idea here was a) to test Jeni Britton's eggless ice cream recipe in a more complicated preparation than straight vanilla and b) use the leftover CSA carambola.

1 carambola
2/3 cup chopped pineapple
1 Tablespoon salted butter
1 Tablespoon brown sugar

The first change was because the carambola was a bit on the small side to flavor a full batch of ice cream. So I added a handful of frozen pineapple. That's not the best quality stuff so I knew I couldn't just use it straight. Instead I broke up the frozen pieces, sliced the carambola, sprinkled both with a mix of brown sugar and softened butter and put them under the broiler for around eight minutes. Broiling isn't the most popular way to cook fruit but I wanted the caramelization intense direct heat would give me which rules out roasting and I wanted to retain the released juices which rules out grilling (even if I had a grill). I think the broiling worked well, deepening and complicating the simple bright flavors of the fruit.

1 1/3 cups whole milk
7 ounces heavy cream
1 scant half cup sugar
1 Tablespoon light corn syrup
1 pinch salt

Next, I cut down the ice cream base recipe by a third since it makes a pretty big batch and I only had 3/4 cup of fruit to add. The original recipe called for simmering the milk and cream for four minutes with a vanilla bean to infuse the flavor so I figured I could simmer with the fruit and get a similar effect. It was kind of weird, but the milk mixture started thickening up before I added the corn starch. I did boil the milk a little high for a while; maybe that was it, or maybe it was a chemical effect from the fruit (although I can't find any indication either fruit can do that). I dunno.

1 scant Tablespoon cornstarch
2 Tablespoons cream cheese, softened

So when I added the cornstarch (mixed with a little of the milk) to the mix, it thickened up into a custard-like consistency. And that got even thicker when I mixed in the cream cheese. That cream cheese was the impetus for the third big change. It was from the same container of cream cheese I used in the original recipe a couple weeks ago and you know how cream cheese gets stronger in flavor over time. With that flavor in the mix, it tasted like cheesecake. Nothing wrong with that even if it wasn't quite what I was aiming at. I decided to go with it by gathering about a half cup of crumbs from my last batch of oat bars (I made it with pumpkin butter as I said I would. Not bad, but I should have added a bit of lemon.) to mix in after churning to simulate a crumb crust.

After a night in the refrigerator, the mix was seriously thick. Mixes that thick usually stop the churn's motor before they can get a good amount of air churned in, but this one, because it was a small batch, managed to wind itself up around the paddle leaving the bucket to spin freely, stopping the churning early without stopping the motor.






In went the crumbs and then a night in the freezer. Here's the final version:

The extra thickness out of the churn translated to a pretty solid, but still scoopable ice cream out of the freezer. There are actually a few issues there; that thickness certainly, but also how packed full of solid bits this particular flavor is, and third, the ice cream began melting with some alacrity as I was scooping it out of the churn-bucket which means I immediately lost a fair bit of the churned in air. In the future I think I'll stick a dishtowel in the freezer to use as a buffer between the ice cream carton I'm filling and the warm metal top of my kitchen cart.

All those solid bits I mentioned mean that this is a pretty chewy ice cream. The strong cream cheese flavor I was getting earlier is hard to find between the crust crumbs and bits of caramelized fruit in each bite. The former is a little prominent over the latter so I'd make a note to use less next time if I had any idea how much I used this time. On the other hand, the fruit flavor has spread out into the ice cream itself more. It's subtle until you bit into a bit of fruit, but it's there. Pineapple and carambola don't identifiably jump out at you (particularly since their flavors were altered by the broiling) but that light vague tropical flavor permeates the whole. Leaving the fruit a little chunky (and leaving the skin on the carambola) was a good idea; I like all the different textures I'm getting and the variation in flavor in each bite. There's a good bit of sugar in each of the components so the whole is pretty sweet, but I think there's enough else going on to keep it from getting cloying. Overall, I'm really liking the combination and complexity of this recipe and the Jeni-style base is an important component and not just a good way to avoid separating eggs. It's got a real Ben & Jerry's vibe to it, too. Nobody else has tried it yet, but I think it's going to go over well.

CSA week six - tomato-carambola sorbet

This isn't an unusual combination for salads (and if you haven't tried it, you should) and I always have an eye out for interesting possibilities for sorbets and ice creams. And interesting this did turn out to be.  

Ingredients:

1 1/2 tomatoes, peeled and seeded

2 medium carambola, peeled as best you can and seeded (which is easier than you'd expect if you don't mind unsightly shredded results)

5 fluid ounces sugar (I used a not-fully refined sugar with a bit of molasses still in it)

5 fluid ounces water 

1 pinch salt

juice from one thick lime wedge

1 Tablespoon light rum

1. Purée the tomato and carambola. I ended up with about 2 cups worth so I scaled the other ingredients to match.

2. Make a simple syrup by bringing the sugar, salt and water to a simmer. Let it cool for a few minutes.

3. Mix everything in a blender. You're blending the fruit twice to get it extra smooth.

4. Chill, churn, ripen, scoop. You know the drill.

You can see in the picture that the texture isn't as smooth as my sorbets usually get. I skimped a bit on the rum and over-churned. I've since broken it up like a granita so it's more crumbly than solid which isn't too bad. It'll smooth out as it melts a little.

The tomatoes from this week's CSA share never ripened quite right so the sorbet has that tart, resinous flavor slightly under-ripe tomatoes have. It's an interesting match with the tartness of the carambolas and the slight acid of the lime. I've got to admit that of all the ridiculous flavors of ice cream and sorbet I've made this is the first one that's really wierded me out. It's bright and fruity--the tomato and carambola seamlessly blended into a quite pleasant tropical-noted flavor, but it's still clearly under-ripe tomato in there and it's hard to get past that. I'm going to offer this to my co-workers without telling them what's in it to see if the tomato really is that obvious and how it goes over without that knowledge.