Roasted Banana Ice Cream

I got this recipe from the excellent The Perfect Scoop, about which more later, so I won’t reproduce the recipe verbatim. But you roast your bananas with brown sugar and butter and then you blend with milk and vanilla and more sugar and so on. No eggs involved.

There is an attractive picture of bananas prior to roasting to your right. The sugar didn’t caramelize as much as I think it’s supposed to; I have a pan with a bunch of almost burnt sugar in the bottom. I should have read up on how that works first, but the banana mix (which is currently churning into ice cream) doesn’t smell burnt or anything, so I don’t think I’ve ruined it. We have plans to put roasted salted peanuts on top of the ice cream when we eat it.

And post-churn, we have pretty good ice cream. It’s less sweet than the others I’ve done, which I suspected would be the case, since it just uses less sugar and the bananas alone won’t make up for that. This allows the caramel and the banana flavors to shine more. I dig it. It’s almost smoky with the brown sugar and all.

The chai ice cream turned out a little chalky in the end. I didn’t like the taste, and Susan didn’t so much like the texture. I think it’s a lesson in ingredients — I’d have been better off using a purer tea rather than tea bags. Also, next time I do a custard we’re going to use real eggs; I suspect the substitutes, which are mostly egg whites, are not thickening the ice cream the way yolks would.