Being creatures of the library, we found the book Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream. It's a recipe collection from a family that started an ice cream truck in Manhattan that sold their own home-made premium ice cream. Their business grew to multiple trucks and shops. They've done well enough to print this book. The recipes are designed for home use (not for their large-volume production) so I thought I'd try the Brown Butter Pecan Ice Cream, one that fit with ingredients we had at home. We started with browning the butter, boiling an unsalted stick on the stove.
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| Browning butter |
Meanwhile, we set up a double boiler consisting of our pasta pot and a large glass bowl. The idea is to control the cooking temperature. We added the recommended heavy cream, milk, kosher salt, and the browned butter (which never really got brown--we ran out of patience with it not browning! If we do this recipe again, we need to set it hotter or longer (or both)).
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| Double boiling |
While that was getting to steamy, we set up an ice bath and separated eight eggs. The yolks were whisked with some sugar in yet another bowl.
When the double boiler was boiling enough, we started taking small portions and adding it to the yolk mixture. The idea is to get the yolks hot enough to go into the double boiler without cooking. We are making butter pecan, not butter and eggs! The process required a lot of patience but was done soon enough.
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| Turning it into custard |
With all the mixture together, we stirred and stirred and stirred. The criteria for when the custard was ready is to take the wooden spoon out, hold it horizontal, have the custard cling to the back, and be able to draw a finger through the custard and it won't come back together. Once we got there, we strained the custard into the ice bath and then whisked it more until it was cooled enough to go into the refrigerator. The book's recommendation is to let the custard cool at least four hours, preferably overnight. We let it go overnight.
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| Buttery custard |
The next morning it was the usual routine, twenty-five minutes in the ice cream maker, then pour in the solid stuff (this time, pecans) and run for another five minutes. The results were quite good. There was a little bit of grittiness which may have been from chopping the pecans (thus pecan dust in the ice cream). It was very smooth and did not have any egg flavor, which I was worried about.
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| Finished product |
Was all the effort worth it? I am not sure. I'd certainly do it again for a holiday treat (all the work comes the day before the actual serving, so it won't interrupt main course work). But not for everyday ice cream. I don't have that much spare time! At least, not during the summer with the kids at home.
After that, we did something simpler, the old favorite chocolate malt. This time, we used the store brand chocolate bars (they were on sale!) and just half a cup of malted milk powder mixed in with the chocolate and sugar. We boiled milk on the stove and mixed it with the chocolate and sugar so it all melted together.
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| Supermarket brand |
After refrigerating the mixture for about two hours, the machine went to work. The results were just as good as the premium chocolate bars to our taste, though a side-by-side taste test might be different.
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| Chocolate Malt II |
Next, we tried combining the best of two recipes. The grocery store had a sale on strawberries so we had extra. Using the Van Leeuwen recipe to make strawberry compote, we mascerated some strawberries overnight. Different from the ice cream maker's recipe, we diced the strawberries and we left them to the next morning.
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| Diced with lemon juice and sugar |
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| After a night in the cooler (note masher in background) |
The next Van Leeuwen step was to mash the strawberries. The potato masher did not seem like it was doing much (maybe we diced the strawberries too small?). The picture makes it look more successful in creating a compote.
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| Mashed strawberries |
We used the regular mixer recipe for the ice cream base (milk, cream, sugar, vanilla) instead of the long, egg-centric Van Leeuwen recipe. We halved the milk to offset the extra liquid we'd get from the strawberry compote. We combined the compote and the ice cream base in the mixer and let it do its thing. The strawberries turned out to be a bit much for the mixer. We could tell after we poured it in that there was more than the usual volume. After twenty of the twenty-five minutes, the ice cream was on the verge of overflowing. So we stopped it early.
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| Coming out the sides |
The results looked great. The nice, light pink color with tiny flecks of strawberry tastes good. The bits of strawberry are small enough to not be ice cubes in the ice cream, another advantage over the last batch of strawberry ice cream.
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| Strawberry II |
We might need to boil down the strawberry compote or use fewer strawberries so the mixer doesn't go into overflow. Or strain out the strawberry chunks and add them during the last five minutes.
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