ice-cream

This is the story of how I made a lot of ice cream by mistake, no really.

Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home is a pretty interesting contrast to my current ice cream bible, the David Lebovitz book. They’re both really good ice cream books. The latter is a slow foodie’s dream: all natural ingredients, slow preparation, real egg custard bases, and so on. The former is not molecular gastronomy or anything, but it’s definitely on the cooking as science side of the fence. I did my first recipe from the Jeni’s book tonight; just a plain vanilla ice cream. The generic base uses cream cheese to get the richness that normally comes from egg yolks. It also incorporates cornstarch, which works to provide better texture by impeding crystal formation. And I guess the corn syrup helps with texture as well? So in general, more processed ingredients for the sake of better texture. ...

I took David Lebovitz’s custard-based chocolate ice cream and cut the cream down by half a cup to 1.5 cups and the chocolate down to 4 ounces from 5 ounces. The first change was in the interests of making sure we have room for raspberry swirl in the ice cream container, and the second was because it seemed like a waste to open an extra bar of semisweet Ghiardelli’s chocoate to get one extra ounce. The mix is sitting in the fridge right now, and by pre-frozen taste test it’ll work out just fine. ...

So this is your basic chocolate ice cream recipe, Philadelphia-style (no eggs), but you also add a bit of brandy and some cinnamon and a bunch of chile powder. The recipe calls for either ancho or chipotle chile powder; we went for ancho. My initial reaction on tasting the mix was that it was a bit wussy, but I’m more hardcore about heat than is reasonable. It is super-rich and chocolatey, so all’s well! And when I have a chance to make this with Chris T., we’ll fiddle around with a hotter batch. You could do this with a small amount of naga jolokia and get something really interesting.

If you look, the Internet will tell you that it’s OK to use Eggbeaters in ice cream recipes. As is so often the case, the Internet lies. I had been using Eggbeaters but I swapped to real eggs for David Lebovitz’ oatmeal raisin ice cream, without the raisins, which is more or less like this recipe. Add some oatmeal praline, put some cinnamon and brown sugar in the heavy cream, and drop the whole vanilla bean step and there you go. The custard was definitely trickier with real eggs; there was a bit of scramble in it but that’s why you strain it and all and all it was fine. And the resulting ice cream is awesome, or at least I assume it will be once it freezes up. Cause it’s pretty good right out of the ice cream maker. Putting real eggs in makes a huge difference. You can mock me now if you like. ...

This is oatmeal praline, which is pretty easy to make if you pay close attention to the sugar. Came out way better than the roasted bananas. Tangentially, the problem there was that I tossed the bananas with the brown sugar in the pan, which left a lot of stray brown sugar in the pan, which was bad. I should have tossed the bananas and the sugar elsewhere. Water under the bridge. Anyhow, the oatmeal praline is going to wind up in some nice vanilla ice cream tomorrow, which will be made with real egg yolks, so we’ll see how that all works out.

I got two books on making ice cream. I’m very pleased with one; I am not so pleased with the other. Perfect Scoop is really good. David Lebovitz was a pastry chef at Chez Panisse and he cares a lot about good ice cream; his cookbook gives a nice solid grounding in ice cream theory and then rolls into a ton of recipes. There are also sections on granitas, toppings, and things to serve ice cream in. It’s a very foodie cookbook but it’s also very practical – there are not a lot of super-weird ingredients and he’s not snotty about using just the right thing. ...

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. ...

I started with my previous recipe, and modified it to be in line with this one. I dropped the vanilla and changed the dairy products to one quart of half-and-half as per the second recipe – I’d wanted to thin out the fat content a bit, and getting rid of the whipping cream should take care of that. I also used just 3/4ths of a cup of sugar, and a smidge less than 2 eggs. I suppose I could have scaled the second recipe up but using 1 quart of half-and-half is awfully convenient. The ratio of sugar is a bit lower than before, which should allow the tea flavor to come out more. ...

I started with this: 2 eggs (used Eggbeaters to avoid raw egg problems) 1 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 cups whipping cream 2 cups half-and-half 1/2 cup 1% milk 2 1/4 teaspoons vanilla (original) The original recipe calls for 2 1/2 cups of whipping cream, but I wanted to make it a tad less rich and they sell whipping cream by the cup, so it was simplest to just put half a cup of milk in. I cooked everything but the vanilla over lowish-medium heat till it hit 160 degrees, then poured it into a bowl over ice to cool quickly. The custard texture wasn’t super-thick, but it coated a metal spoon nicely enough. ...