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.

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.

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.

CSA week 20 - Malted honey peanut butter balls two ways

I found this recipe on the thekitchen.com blog and there was some discussion in the comments of this being (or at least being a variation on) a traditional American recipe, but I've never seen it before and Googling doesn't turn it up anywhere else. Their recipe tweaks a recipe in from the 1976 More-with-Less Cookbook. I suppose that's enough time for it to filter out a little and the origin to be forgotten. You can see their version here. For my first version I tweaked the recipe a little more but still kept it simple.

Ingredients:
1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 cup natural unsweetened creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup honey
1 cup malted milk powder
1/3 cup white chocolate

1. Toast coconut flakes (carefully as they go from raw to burnt very quickly) and break them up into small bits in a clean spice or coffee grinder.

2. Mix coconut bits with honey, peanut butter and malted milk powder until they form a slightly sticky, crumbly lump. I found that the full cup of powder didn't want to incorporate so I had to knead it in like getting all of flour into a wet dough.

3. Let rest a short while to hydrate, then pinch off pieces and roll into balls.

4. Melt white chocolate in microwave or in a double boiler. Dip each ball into the chocolate and set somewhere cool to firm up. If you store them in the refrigerator, let them warm up a bit before serving.

OK, maybe that's not quite as simple as the original mix-then-roll-into-balls, but the toasting and the white chocolate are good additions.

This was good, but messy at Miami room temperature as the balls slumped and expressed oil while the white chocolate melted. Also, I wasn't entirely happy with the grainy final texture. I was clear that while the malted milk was fully incorporated a lot of it was only mixed in and not dissolved.

I wondered what would happen if I melted the honey, peanut butter and white chocolate together and then mixed in the powders. Secondarily, I had just bought a bottle of amber agave nectar. I had only tried the light version before and I was wondering how this slightly more flavorful version would work in this recipe.

That makes the new recipe:
1/3 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 cup natural unsweetened creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup agave nectar
1 cup malted milk powder
1/3 cup white chocolate
a few drops vanilla

1. Toast coconut flakes and grind them into a paste oozing coconut oil in a clean spice or coffee grinder. (Another change there to smooth out the texture.)

2. In small saucier, melt peanut butter, nectar, vanilla and chocolate and stir until homogeneous. Stir in coconut and malted milk powder and blend. When the powders have been fully incorporated, pour the mixture out into a small container to cool. The texture at this point was the gooey sticky napalm of melted marshmallow so may have been possible to whip in some air to adjust the texture as it cooled, but I just let it settle into a dense brick and sliced it up into rectangular cuboids. (That's the right term; don't blame me. Hyperrectangle or 3-D orthotope are close, but imply hollowness. That leaves out 'box', too.)


I took both into work and had a taste test. The results were close, but by a small margin everyone preferred the second version. The texture ended up somewhere between caramel and fudge, which is a good place for a candy to end up and sure you'll agree. I pressed the point that the crumblier candy and creamy chocolate coating made the first version much more interesting texturally, but good was preferred over interesting (much to my and every other experimental chef's disappointment).

They also liked the purer peanut flavor to the honey/peanut mix. The amber agave really wasn't much different from the light version. They both have the vacant mildly floral sweetness of honeysuckle easily overwhelmed by the stronger flavors at play here. I shouldn't have been surprised; it says "mild" right there on the bottle. The malt and coconut flavors are there too, but they're enriching the peanut, not standing up recognizably on their.


One of my colleagues who's from south India made the interesting observation that the second version's flavors and textures aren't far from some traditional candies from that region. That opens the possibilities of adding cardamom, pistachios, maybe rosewater. Lots of room for further experimentation here, but they're plenty tasty as is too.

CSA - Tastes like soap

Really fancy soap, sure, but still not what I was hoping for. I'm talking about my latest sherbet here and looking at the ingredients I really shouldn't be surprised: avocado, lemon, honey, lavender and thyme. But avocado ice cream isn't all that unusual (as unusual ice creams go) and it's usually paired with lemon. Honey--avocado honey from a previous CSA delivery--is a natural addition. It's where I started getting creative with the flavorings that things went wrong. I'm not going to say lavender and thyme were bad ideas; both go well with the other flavors involved here and straight out of the blender the sherbet base had a lovely rich, sweet and slowly blooming herbal mix of flavors. The problem only came after churning; the low temperatures damped all the flavors down except the lavender. That actually seems to have intensified into a nasty astringent long-lingering chemical tang. So, a teaspoon of lavender extract is way too much. So noted.

On the other hand, the texture is as smooth and creamy as you might ask for, albeit recognizably with the particular smoothness of avocado, the color is lovely (you'll have to trust me on that one. My phone-camera's white balance can't capture the reality of its pale green) and, like I said before, the flavors work if I can get the balance right. I'm going to try this again when some avocados show up in the CSA and I'll give a proper recipe then.

CSA week eleven - banana-habenero ice cream with cinnamon-honey-peanut butter candy chunks

The honey is the CSA bit by the way.

Banana ice cream is a special case. There's some magic chemical reaction in the bananas that gives a mixture of bananas, sugar and milk a texture hard to distinguish from an egg custard ice cream. This is the second banana ice cream I've made. For the first I used a recipe from David
Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop cookbook crossed with bananas foster that turned out fabulously. Lebovitz's recipes get huge raves so I was naturally cynical, but the two I've tried were both wonderful so I really should stop screwing around with my own little experiments and just buy the book.

Before I go any further I ought to get my version down for the record.

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 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.

---

Now then, instead of Lebovitz's recipe as a base today I used Alton Brown's banana ice cream recipe:

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
to which I added
1 seeded and chopped yellow habañero pepper
that's just enough to add some background heat without competing with the bananas.

Brown didn't say why he used corn syrup in the episode of Good Eats this recipe comes from. In On Food and Cooking McGee says that corn syrup is used as a thickener in low fat ice creams but with the bananas and heavy cream in this recipe that's not a real concern. If I were to make this again I'd use sugar instead (or Splenda blend which has half the calories and no notable off taste when used in ice cream).

Preparation is simple. Freeze the bananas and defrost so they get goopy. Blend them with the lemon juice (watch out for seeds!), chopped pepper and vanilla. Add the corn syrup; blend some more and then slowly add the cream while the food processor is going. Chill and churn.

The other half of the recipe was intended to be a swirl. That's how it was described in some random ice cream recipe I stumbled onto on the web. And maybe if I had started with a supermarket peanut butter it would have worked that way. Instead I started with whole peanuts.

A bit more than a cup of whole lightly salted peanuts, blended for a minute or two made
2/3 cup peanut butter
to which I added
1 pinch salt
1/4 cup medium-dark honey
2 Tablespoons peanut oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon

when I noticed that it had turned into a solid mass I added a bit more of everything but peanuts. The cinnamon and honey were absorbed but the oil wasn't. I poured off most of the oil and gave it a good kneading to try to get some more incorporated. Not much luck there, but the extra blending did make the mass quite smooth and a bit gooier. The texture was like a sugar syrup at the firm-ball stage if there are any confectioners reading who know what that means. When I froze a small ball of the candy on its own it got pretty solid, but in the ice cream it stayed a nice soft caramel texture (presumably by stealing moisture from the ice cream). However, since it was warm when I mixed it in some crunchy ice crystals formed. Next time I'll tear it into pieces and then chill before adding them. Another small problem was a yumminess differential between the peanut-butter candy and the more mild and subtle banana flavor of the ice cream. The peppers made the ice cream speak a little louder but the candy was a much stronger flavor.

Still, on the whole, successful bar the whining about the pepper and my need to screw up perfectly good ice cream (before anyone tried it I should point out). Not as good as the bananas foster ice cream but quite nice.