This Week in Ice Cream Club – Gimme S’more!

Hey there Ice Cream Club! After a week of grey hazy skies from the wildfire smoke, we had a delightful display of sunshine this afternoon. The air is much nicer, too, but even though today is the last day of Summer, it’s getting cold. We’re unlikely to get nights that are too hot to sleep, and days where the drips from your cone evaporate into an ice cream vapour before they hit the ground. For a little while, at least.

Some people like to take a flying leap out into nature when they find themselves on the cusp of Autumn. Let’s go camping, they say! It’s intense!

This year, a lot of those people are staying in, for a lot of reasons. But some of them will go to great lengths to preserve the fun and excitement of camping, in their own homes. Tents will be set up in living rooms, dens and backyards. Singalongs and game nights will be held, and phones will be confined to pockets because there’s no signal in the campground. Weenies and marshmallows can even be roasted over the barbeque, which leads us to the ultimate point of camping: the S’more.

Sure the air is fresh, and the sleeps are deep, and the bears can only reach so high, but we all know it’s really about the fire-roasted mallow on the graham cracker with the chocolate slab, served with a side of burnt fingers. It’s a hot treat for a cool night in the woods, so naturally a S’more ice cream would be a perfect cool treat for a hot night in the tent in the living room. So how do we do that?

If you can make your own ice cream, like me, you can start with a simple vanilla base. I have a basic recipe here that you’re welcome to use. The shorthand is 2 cup milk, combined with 1/2 cup sugar, then cooked with 3 tempered egg yolks into a custard, then strained into 1 cup heavy (33%) cream and 1 tsp vanilla extract.

After we have a determined base, we next get to figure out how to get the elements of the S’more into it. We need a few elements, and I would list them as: chocolate slab, graham cracker, marshmallow, burnt sugar flavour, heat and/or smoke. If you just throw a bunch of chocolate chips, marshmallows and graham pieces into a vanilla base, you’ll have something reminiscent of S’mores, but I’ll bet it’s missing a few somethings.

When considering the chocolate, the classic hot S’more appears in magazines with a Hershey bar section. Hershey bars are pretty good chocolate, but what they add most is a substantial thickness and a nice snap, even when it gets melty. Thin chocolate, including syrup, just doesn’t provide the density or satisfaction that a think bar section does. Chocolate Chips get weird in ice cream, too, and often are brittle. My solution here has been to melt down chips in a double boiler and then pour the mixture out onto a silicone baking sheet at a decent thickness and let it cool and harden. You can even properly temper the chocolate if you’re more precise, but I’ve had good results without paying too much attention to the temperature. It doesn’t need to maintain a shape or a structure, just maintain a meaningful presence in the ice cream.

Graham crackers should be a simple include into ice cream, and can be. They go well with anything cheesecake, too. They do however suffer from the same fate as any cookie will, and that’s an eventual moisture-based disintegration into mush. Grahams resist it better than most, and have a distinct flavour, so it’s a minimal issue if you plan on eating the ice cream right away. I’ve tried a crumble with butter and sugar, and it made little difference. It would be a fine topping, but that’s a cop-out here. What I would recommend is combining the grahams and the chocolate when making S’mores ice cream. While the chocolate-dipped grahams from the grocery store were nothing like conventional grahams, the chocolate coating made a world of difference. I would try chunking up my graham pieces and doing a chocolate coating with the melted chocolate from the previous paragraph. I think I’d pour half my mix onto the silicone sheet, then put my grahams on it, then pour the rest over top. I will test this out this coming week and report back.

Marshmallows are a tricky ingredient in ice cream. Obviously we can’t really toast them first… or can we? I found a method online of toasting them quickly at a high oven temperature, which dried them out without shrinking them too much. They were a nice, toasty flavour, and a fun crunch, but after a few days in the mix, disappeared. I’ve tried ‘raw’ marshmallows in ice cream many times, and while they also disappear eventually, I do like them in there. You get the flavour and the airiness, and a little sense of them, even when they sugar bonds have broken down. What’s important to think about, really, is how marshmallows are a soft-textured, vanilla-flavoured thing. Like the ice cream base itself. If we can account for the campfire-enhanced properties of the marshmallow elsewhere, I think we can let the basic mix cover that base and maybe toss in a bunch of ‘raw’ mallows for that extra nudge.

Which brings me to the last two elements of the S’more, the burnt sugar flavour and the heat/smoke aspect. We can talk all day about what amount of fire makes the perfect marshmallow, but all of the resulting flavours are somewhere on the spectrum of toasty to burnt, and we can get that through caramel. A thin caramel sauce, or even a brittle, where the sugar has been cooked a little on the dark side, feels like it could get there. Putting mini marshmallows into the brittle, or dipping them in caramel before adding them to the mix seems like something I should do.

The heat/smoke is both an opportunity to get creative, and to ruin a few good ice creams with some totally inappropriate additions like liquid smoke. I’m not ruling it out, but tiny amounts of big flavours go a long way in ice cream, and stuff like liquid smoke, hickory, and stuff like that might overwhelm everything and make it very gross. There’s a lot we could do here, but I’m going to start with a tried and true combination, and put some chili in my chocolate. Second, I’m going to go with a little crunch and pop of spice, and grind some fresh black pepper into my brittle with the marshmallows. I think all of the above will bring the heat, and I’m looking forward to testing it out and sharing the results with you!

Speaking of big flavours in tiny amounts that make all the difference, how about that vanilla? I just made a couple of batches without it, of all things. They look like vanilla ice cream, but I swapped out the extract. I’ve been fascinated with the potential of non-vanilla extracts, even though they can taste medicinal or like chemicals. The only other one I’ve had on hand to work with is almond, which I’ve used at half the amount I’d use vanilla. This time, however, I went with booze instead. We have a bottle of root beer schnapps on our kitchen counter, and I’ve been dying to use it in place of vanilla. Turns out it works great.

The amount of flavour per teaspoon in liqueurs and spirits and such is low compared to extracts, and there’s only so much alcohol you can add to an ice cream before it starts showing its antifreeze properties. So I don’t know that booze is going to be any kind of a direct substitute, but the schnapps at 1:1 in place of vanilla added a similar flavour with a teeny tiny je ne sais quoi. Further testing will be done, for sure.

The first batch of the root beer base ice creams got sandwich cookies and Smarties candy. It’s my roommate’s birthday week, and everybody in his life is trying to stuff him with food. One of his all time favourites is cookies and cream ice cream, and I’m taking it up a notch with Smarties.

The mix looks great, and might be something to do often. I’ve written about my apple coring tool as a cookie crusher, and here it is in action.

Crunch! As you can see, there’s a little round bit in the middle that is mostly intact. The cookies are fairly crumbly, but I managed to get enough little circles to use for decoration.

After that, I jazzed up the top of the first container of birthday ice cream. First? Oh yes.

I hope my roommate likes it. Happy Birthday! Feel free to eat it all in one sitting! I will be covering the other birthday ice creams next week, as they’re still ideas and mixes right now. Chocolate will figure for sure.

That’s about it for this week from me, Ice Cream Club. I will leave you with an awesome discovery that’s probably not for ice cream, unless as a topping. I love cereal, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros (left in picture) are amazing. The texture is especially satisfying, and they aren’t too sweet. Next to them are the more sweet and less amazing Maple Eggo Waffle cereal. Pretty good, but not as good as the Churros. I’d have either as a topping, but like most cereals, they will disintegrate quickly if you try to incorporate them into your mix. Like the graham crackers in the S’mores ice cream, perhaps the secret is a chocolate coating.

Stay safe out there, Ice Cream Club, whether it’s in the wilderness, the yard, or the great expanse of the living room. Being responsible around flammables is key, and so is being kind to those around you. You never know where a helping hand might come from, even if you just need some help unzipping the tent flap. Thanks for reading! Your life matters! Black Lives Matter!