This is the story of how I made a lot of ice cream by mistake, no really.
Start out with Lisa Fain’s cinnamon-chipotle pecans. I got this from her cookbook, which is a pretty good cookbook although I suspect she tends to spice a bit less heavily than I like. Thus, I added extra chipotle powder and more brown sugar.
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 cups raw pecan halves
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon chipotle powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
pinch of salt
Preheat the oven to 350. Melt the butter in a skillet over low heat, add the pecans and coat ’em in the butter, and then add everything else and stir to coat. Then put the pecans in the oven on a cookie sheet or something and bake for like 15 minutes. Salt afterwards.
You will note that this makes four cups of pecans. This is way too many pecans to use in one batch of ice cream. Oh no, whatever shall I do?
Like a persistent person, I plowed ahead with David Lebovitz’s Philadelphia-style chocolate ice cream recipe.
2 cups heavy cream
6 tablespoons unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1 1/2 cup whole milk
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of salt
He says unsweetened chocolate but Lindt dark works just fine. Possibly I should have cut down a bit on the sugar as a result. You could cut back on the chocolate, too — this winds up being insanely chocolately. I like that anyhow, and I really like it if I’m putting something spicy in, because the spice stands up to the chocolate and so on.
Boil everything but the vanilla, milk, and chocolate. (I boiled the milk too by mistake. Didn’t hurt.) Take it off the heat and whisk in the chocolate. Then whisk in the milk and vanilla. Then blend it all for like 30 seconds.
Then you chill the mix overnight, and wake up in the morning and dump it in the ice cream maker and at the end you put in half the pecans and you have half of them left over. It’s very good.
OK. So I figured for the rest of the pecans I’d make cinnamon ice cream. Lebovitz has a good recipe there as well but I thought I’d check my other ice cream cookbooks for variety, and that led to trouble when I got distracted by Jeni’s Kona Stout ice cream. Susan had these two bottles of Boulevard Brewing Company Dark Truth Stout left over. So it only seemed natural to interrupt the stream of spiced candied pecan ice creams for some coffee beer ice cream. Thus, I did that.
Jeni’s still uses this funky corn starch corn syrup no egg method, which you can get a feel for here. David Lebovitz knows all about ice cream so we can rely on his explanation. It does make for tasty ice cream; I just like the egg flavor. But do I want egg flavor along with my beer and coffee? No.
That ice cream will be done freezing in the morning.
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