The Ice Cream Club

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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

This Week in Ice Cream Club – A Week that Wasn’t

Hey out there Ice Cream Club! You look like you’ve got it all together! I sure wish I felt that way. While I had a pretty decent week this past week, I didn’t do much on the ice cream front. I even messed up a batch, because I let time get away from me and the milk in the base passed the expiry date.

The batch that didn’t make it was the corn ice cream I’ve been anticipating pretty heavily. I’ve made it in previous years, and it’s a subtle, sweet corny flavour with an extra smooth texture thanks to the natural cornstarch. I cut the niblets from the cob, and then blend them with milk and let them steep as long as I can. Then I make a custard out of the milk, and strain out the corn. This batch didn’t get to the custard stage. Sad but true.

I hate wasting food, because there’s very few excuses for it these days. The news is full of hungry people and deep carbon footprints. Making sure we eat what we buy is important, and if the exposure to how our supply lines work because of Covid-19 doesn’t show you how much goes into every morsel of food, then I don’t know what to say. The expired milk and the wasted corn do not speak well of me as a resident of the planet, and even though it’s too late to do anything but compost the mixture, I have to make sure to learn from it.

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One of the more important lessons I’ve learned from making ice cream is how much the timing matters. The expiry of your dairy and eggs is crucial to note, in large part because you may not be using it all at once, and each of the individual products expire at different rates. In an ideal world, you’d simply buy what you needed on the day of production. But the world is hardly ideal or simple, and buying in quantity for price reasons, or being unable to shop at will are realities for a lot of people.

Ingredient expiry becomes extra important when life rears its ugly head. I was a bit burnt out this week on making ice creams. It’s quite a lot of work, especially the clean up, and while my enthusiasm and curiosity usually overrides fatigue, not this week. Putting off finishing the corn mix was a daily procrastination, until the point of no return. It could have been any number of little reasons, too, including ones I could do nothing about. Whatever the reason, I had to toss something I planned to enjoy eating. Food only for thought.

Since I don’t have much practical ice cream stuff to talk about this week, I’ve written a separate post about Cookies in Ice Cream. While it’s not a firm goal, I can envision writing a book about ice cream in future, and posts like this are pretty much what the stuff of it would be.

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While I plan to make more ice creams soon, I’m not going to push things. Though in the name of good timing, I have to consider the local peach and corn crops this week. Putting that off to next year is regrettable, and supporting local farmers is more important than ever. In the meantime, I’m going to try and do more posts like the Cookies in Ice Cream, and flesh out the site.

Thanks as always for reading, Ice Cream Club! You’re the best. In this last official week of summer, I hope you’re found on a porch somewhere, or socially distanced in a park or on a beach. Safe any which way. With a great big drippy two-or-more scoop cone. Or an architecturally precarious sundae. Or just a little bowl of frozen heaven. You deserve it! You are awesome, and your life matters! Black Lives Matter!

Cookies in Ice Cream

Cookies and Cream ice cream is one of the primary reasons I got into making ice cream. Whether they’re crunchy or soft, the texture of the cookies is usually great, and they add a counterpoint of sweet to the ice cream base. It’s common to see Cookies and Cream done with chocolate cookie bits, which brings a note of bitterness as well. When an ice cream is more complex in flavour because you’ve added a beloved ingredient like cookies, it’s easy to see why it’s a hit.

Because of the sheer dominance of Oreos in the marketplace, they have to be the first cookie considered when talking about Cookies and Cream ice cream. If you buy that flavour from the store, or in a restaurant, it’s probably a vanilla base with Oreo crumbs. Maybe not name brand crumbs, but any pretender is using the similarities to Oreos as their selling point. Oreos are part of a greater family of cookies known as Sandwich Cookies, which have some sort of filling into between two cookie layers. In commercial Cookies and Cream ice creams, the base stands in for the cookie’s cream filling. I have found, however, that chopping up whole sandwich cookies, filling and all, is even better.

Not all sandwich cookies are created equal. For a basic Cookies and Cream ice cream, the only type I bother with are the cheapest, no-name variety at the grocery store. They tend to be nice and chunky, nice and sweet, have a chocolate option, or a choco/vanilla split, and hold up in the ice cream. Other varieties break down too easily and don’t provide as much cookie experience. Also, you get way more cookies for way less. Oreos are nice and hard little biscuits, and hold up well in the mix, but they lack volume. There’s no real taste difference, so you might as well go cheaper and chunkier.

What Oreo does do better than anyone else, however, is seasonal flavours, promo flavours, and a few awesome regulars. Among the standouts have been Apple Pie, Lemon (thins), Salt Caramel (thins), Mint, Peppermint Bark, Pistachio, Cinnamon Bun, Carrot Cake and Dark Chocolate. Less awesome but still good were Coconut, Fireworks, Birthday Cake, Hot Cocoa, and regular Chocolate. The Double Stuff and Extra Stuff varieties are too much Stuff. I have also tried Matcha Green Tea and Blueberry sandwich cookies from overseas, but they were stale. I’m sure fresh ones would be much better.

The keys to a good sandwich cookie in ice cream are the same as any cookie: it has to provide big flavour and a noticeable texture. Many cookies are excellent as cookies, but aren’t really appropriate for ice cream use. You can adapt existing cookie recipes to be more durable in the mix, or more punchy in flavour, but some cookies are simply more suited for the job. Sandwich cookies are the champs, but there are other options, too.

Gingerbread and other heavy, substantial cookies can be a good fit. Gingerbread has a strong flavour, though I’ve found it and ginger snaps can taste weird and sour in ice cream. Harder varieties of gingerbread will do better than the cakey, molasses-rich ones, although if they get too dry, they can crumble to nothing.

Chocolate chip cookies are often prized for being chewy and soft, but in ice cream, they will likely go to mush. The effect, however, is easy to attain with a firmer vanilla biscuit and mini chocolate chips. Larger chips can freeze pretty hard and be flinty. If you make your own vanilla biscuits, adding some brown sugar will make them even more like chocolate chip cookies.

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Oatmeal and similar crumbly cookies are not going to hold up well. You will likely be left with soggy oats and mush. Even something like granola will get mushy quickly, and doesn’t do much for the effect. Raisins and a vanilla biscuit will get enough of the way for oatmeal cookie fans, and you can soak the raisins for a bit in some alcohol to plump them. Be careful to drain them well, as too much alcohol will prevent freezing.

Graham crackers can sometimes be substantial enough to hold up to ice cream, and even if they start to turn to mush, at least retain enough of their original flavour to be in consideration for S’mores and cheesecake ice creams. Crumbling the grahams, and baking them briefly with butter and sugar will add some longevity and punch to the cookies.

Wafer and other light, delicate cookies do not do well in ice cream at all, though they sometimes get covered in chocolate to make them more durable. Small, completely covered pieces might work, but will start dissolving if moisture gets to them.

Macarons, the fancy-finicky sandwich cookies, are trendy and show off the baker’s skill, but they will dissolve quickly in ice cream. They are mostly used for their ability to show off flavour, like ice cream, and have little to add on their own. Meringues would work the same way. Marshmallows and aerated sugar creations do not last in ice cream.

Macaroons, not macarons, the chunky coconut and sometimes chocolate lumps, are not really worth bothering about, in cookie terms. The flavours of chocolate and coconut are much more easily achieved without getting flour and butter involved, and produces the same effect. Any cookie that’s basically a delivery system for a kind of filling, fruit or topping is best left aside while you focus the ice cream flavour on the filling, fruit or topping.

Any sort of soft ladyfinger, shortbread or sugar cookie likely lacks the staying power to be worth trying in ice cream. The same goes for cookies made with nut flours. In all cases, however, the easiest solution is to use the cookies as a topping if you want them at the ice cream party. No self-respecting bowl of ice cream or cookie would turn down that offer.

Gluten-free cookies offer a major challenge to the ice-cream maker. Flavour is no issue, but you double down on cookie disintegration. Gluten is a binder, so any method that keeps your gluten-free cookies together is essential.

As far as getting the cookies into the ice cream, I find they are best added after the mixture has been churned. That way you can make the chunks into any size you like, rather than be limited to what won’t clog your machine. I like big chunks, and I get them with a tool that’s normally used to core and section apples. I can even crunch down a small stack of cookies at once. With some skill, you can even cut a mini-cookie out of the middle, with the logo on it and everything. Those make fantastic little toppers for sundaes, cones or whatever you like.

One little tip to consider is chilling your cookie chunks or crumbs until moments before adding them to the ice cream mix. Less ice cream will melt directly around them, which will add as one extra layer of moisture protection. It’s the little things like this that make all the difference!

This Week in Ice Cream Club – Trust the Process

Hey there Ice Cream Club! Has it been a week? I feel like I spent the last seven days with my head inside a fruit stand. Last Sunday, I loaded up on local treefruit, courtesy of a generous new friend. With ten or more pounds each of apples, pears and plums, my work was cut out for me. Naturally that wasn’t enough, so I added some local peaches to the mix too. Last week I talked about doing a peach-basil sorbet, after hearing about a peach-basil popsicle served as a course at a friend’s wedding many years ago. So I had to do something special to match my vivid imagination’s rendition of a wedding feast popsicle.

If you were to corner me with wedding preparations, and force me to pick a theme, I’d probably float dinosaurs. I’m pretty sure Vera Wang makes a dress with a set of backplates like a Stegosaurus or a lovely sail like a Dimetrodon. The wedding song could be T-Rex’s immortal ‘Bang a Gong.’ And the above popsicles would fit right in, between courses of Buffalo-style Pterodon wings, and gigantic omelettes.

The sorbet is made of peaches that were macerated overnight in some sugar, lemon juice and some limoncello, with fresh basil leaves blended in. My roommates have been very enthusiastic about it, especially the bits of peach skin that survived the puree. They also give it some really nice flecks of dark red colour. I ate the dinosaur pop and it was amazing. For the record, 4 peaches were a perfect amount for a batch of sorbet.

As far as the apples, pears and plums were concerned, it was a process. I started with the plums, most of which were simple halved, pitted and frozen immediately. I kept some aside and roasted them slowly in the oven with some sugar and lemon juice. The plums are of the Damson variety, which means they are small, firm and have a very bittertart greenish yellow flesh. They’re not great for eating from hand, but when they’re roasted, turn deep red and release their sugars. I wish I had saved the roasted plums as is and just eaten them on yogurt or something, but instead I made a crisp. It was just okay. Too much crisp part overwhelming the fruit. I do like the idea of plum crisp as an ice cream flavour though, and plan to make it soon.

The pears got two treatments. First, the less-ripe ones were cut up and cored, and I tried drying them in the oven. I did it on parchment lined baking sheets, which was probably wrong. I wouldn’t do it again without a proper drying rack. I think they were in there for something like 22 hours, with a break while I slept. I had the oven on the lowest setting, at 170C. They got sort of dried. Most were just like you’d buy at the store, but some were still pretty moist.

This is a picture of some of the pear cores. The more-ripe pears were cut up and cooked with brown sugar and yet more lemon juice. Once pureed, they became a delicious pear butter. You could also call them baby food, but that’s going to be a happy baby. I decided to take some of the pear butter and pear it with the dried pears, and added both to a vanilla ice cream base. I called it Pear Pair. I haven’t had it yet, but I’m excited to see how a dried fruit piece does in the ice cream. Raisins do okay, but aren’t very exciting. I’ve tried pears in the past and struggled with the water content, so this should solve that problem.

Speaking of problems, the other time I did make pear ice cream, it wasn’t just the watery pears that were an issue. As much as I practice Food Safety, sometimes a mistake happens, and there are consequences. In this case, I’m pretty sure I was cutting butter either with a knife that had just cut garlic, or on a cutting board where garlic had just been cut. I use butter for a lot of things. I then used some of that butter to make a caramel sauce to go with my pears. There was a nasty flavour in the ice cream that nobody went back to for a second bite, so I can only assume it was garlic. I’ve been extra careful since.

I don’t have much to say about the apples, other than I made a batch of apple butter. I plan to use that in ice cream, either with caramel or with vanilla sandwich cookies. I’ve done pie crust and it’s okay, but vanilla cookies play the part with a sugary kick that makes friends. My roommates are much more into apples than me, so they have dibs on the harvest. With any luck, we’ll be able to get another pick in before the weather changes completely.

I still have some of the Ruby Chocolate from Purdy’s left, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get it into ice cream. While melting it into the custard base makes for great flavour, it falls down on the pink colour, even using 4x 50g bars. So I decided to try and chop some up and add it to a mix. I used more peaches, treated the same way as above, and separated from their macerating liquid. I call the resulting ice cream Pink and Peach.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the combo worked so well. Despite the added sugar, the peaches weren’t sweet enough to carry the team. The chocolate went to fragments too easily when I cut it up, and they weren’t large enough to deliver a big bold flavour. Also, the bits seemed extra waxy when frozen, making for a kinda weird texture. Overall, it’s okay at best. I wouldn’t try it again, even with super-sweet peaches. Here’s a pic of the vanilla base, churning away.

The remaining peaches and peach liquid have already been pureed with my remaining pear butter, and will get sorbet’d tomorrow morning. I had a taste and this one’s really impressive. The peach flavour starts the party, and the pear finishes. 2 each of large peaches and pears would be a good start for a recipe.

Looking ahead, I also have a batch of Corn Ice Cream in progress. I’ve done this before, to great success. I trim the niblets from a fresh cob, then drop them and their liquid into milk, then blend it and let it sit for a day or so in the fridge. I’ll strain the corny bits out before I turn the milk into custard, but the flavour will stick around. I’ve done Candy Corn with toffee bits, but I think this time will be Caramel Corn with a nice caramel ribbon throughout. A terrific side effect of using corn is that you get some of the starch as well, which makes the ice cream just a little smoother and silkier. I wouldn’t add corn starch powder to ice cream otherwise without doing a lot of testing, but I know some people do.

While I haven’t made any ice cream business progress since last week, I did some other fun food stuff. I made pickles out of actual cucumbers, like a boss. I’ve been putting black peppercorns in my pickles, and it’s amazing. They soften and give a wonderful little pepper pop to your sandwiches.

I also roasted a whole chicken, which isn’t that remarkable, except that it was my first time brining the bird beforehand. I just let it sit overnight in a saltwater bath, then roasted it slow for 8 hours on low heat. The brine helped a lot. The skin was crispier than I’m used to, and the meat was more flavourful, even as I got deep into the bird. In the late stages of roasting, I added some small potatoes to get all tasty in the drippings. They were.

All this fresh fruit and such have got me in production mode, and I don’t expect it to slow down much. I expect to make another 3-4 batches of ice cream this coming week, and have lots to write about next time. I hope you have some ice cream in your upcoming week, too. If you’re eating some as you read this, I applaud you!

Once again, thanks for reading and for your enthusiasm about ice cream! While the end of summer is in sight, ice cream persists into the cooler seasons. It’s just so good. And so are you! Cool and sweet! I don’t know who you are, reader, but I do know that you matter. Make sure you share the love, express yourself, be kind to your fellow humans, and get out and vote! Your life matters! Black Lives Matter! We’re all in this together!

This Week in Ice Cream Club – Urban Harvest

Even though it wrapped up my week, I’ll begin with a shoutout to a new friend (a friend of my roommate) who generously opened up their yard and fruit trees to invited pickers. My roommate and I went this afternoon, just before some light rain, and came away with literally pounds of apples, plums and pears. I have a few ice cream ideas, including plum crumble and apple pie, but for now I’m just glad we have the big freezer and I’ll be able to stow away all the fruit we can’t eat or process this week. I’m really stoked on the plums, which I’ve never really used in quantity. I’m sure I’ll have lots to write about next weekend, and some treats for our gracious host this afternoon. Thanks again!

This was a pretty solid week for Ice Creams, even though I only made and churned one mix. The mix in question was a much more successful version of the Ruby Chocolate ice cream. The previous mixes, while tasty, were kind of a latte-esque beige, rather than the robust pink promised by the chocolate bars. The solution? Double the amount of bars used. 4 instead of 2.

More pink this time, though still not the in-your-face pink of the chocolate itself. I’m not sure that’s really achievable, unless a scary amount of the mix is the Ruby chocolate. Which starts to stray from being ice cream and becomes like a sweet frozen wax. I think I have a compromise solution, though it wasn’t what I’d hoped from the Ruby chocolate. I’m going to make a simple vanilla mix and blend in some healthy chunks of the Ruby. That way the pink colour will not only be undisturbed, it will have a backdrop of white to look snazzy on. The Ruby chocolate is unique, and while expensive, is worth trying. This ice cream scooped beautifully straight from the freezer which always makes me happy.

Here’s that same Ruby Chocolate ice cream with some fresh macerated local peaches. Peaches are where I’m going next with ice creams. These are chopped up and mixed with sugar and some splashes each of lemon juice and some limoncello liqueur that lives in our fridge. Then they get to sit there and think about what they did. The various sugars and acids will help break them down and make them softer. Plus the sugary mix will help tame what are kinda tart peaches.

I have a couple of peachy plans. First, I’m going to do what is probably a boring Peaches’n’Cream, with peach chunks in a vanilla mix. I’ll probably lightly caramelize the peach chunks, both to make them sweeter and to reduce their water content a bit so they don’t ice up too much in the freezer. I suppose I could combine them with the Ruby chocolate chunks, and I think I have more than enough fruit to do just that.

The more pressing plan involves the macerated peaches. I’m going to puree a bunch of them with some water and basil, and make sorbet. I walked home from the grocer yesterday with the basil at the top of my bag, and I could smell it the whole way. It was dreamy. It boggles my mind why basil isn’t a perfume option. Probably because the wearers could easily manipulate drooling idiots like me.

Years ago, friends of mine had an appetizer (salad?) course at their wedding that was the talk of the group for awhile. It was a peach and basil popsicle. I never saw one, or a picture, so my mind has created some pretty bizarre images over the years, including them using those DIY plastic stick and mold sets many of of us have as kids, a shocking peach and green edifice rising from an egg cup, and servers standing behind everybody at the head table, holding their popsicles while the revelers licked. I’m sure it was much simpler than any of those, and involved some clever plating mechanism like those things that hold ice cream cones, and was very nice. I mean, you probably don’t arrive on something like that for your wedding feast at random. Sure it made for great conversation among the extended friends, but in the moment, that thing has to taste amazing. I’ve never had the combination, that I can think of, so now’s the time.

Making ice cream has all sorts of bizarre side effects, mostly making friends and finding myself in interesting situations I’d never conceived of. A strange side effect that I’m particularly fond of is Angel Food Cakes. How are they a side effect of making ice creams? Well, my recipe essentially takes a 2L of milk, a 1L of cream and a dozen eggs, along with sugar and vanilla which I just buy in the largest quantity available to make it cheaper, and makes 4 batches. But when it comes to the eggs, I actually only use the yolks. The whites add nothing but unwanted water content to your ice cream, and should be removed for best results. So every 4 batches means I have a dozen egg whites saved up, and that’s eggsactly enough for an Angel Food Cake. The one above looks pretty good, though there are some small chunks of unmixed, par-baked flour that I need to solve next time. The cake is a finicky mix to make, because you have to combine heavy dry ingredients with light, airy beaten egg whites while keeping them light and airy. I did not use a sifter or sieve when I added my dry, and now I know better.

This is a great time for produce overall. I’ve made a lot of interesting food this week, including some pulled pork, some fried shrimp, and a nice romesco sauce. Tomorrow night I’m making a smoky seafood soup. Having extra time to cook during the pandemic has really inspired me to do a lot of these things. I love turning ultra-cheap ingredients into great food, which I’ve long considered turning into a business.

When I first started making ice creams, it seemed natural that I’d end up selling them. The volume of premium dessert vs cost was amazing. I could fit more than enough ice cream ingredients into my regular food budget to be able to give it away liberally. And my food budget is pretty low. With that in mind, I marched out and got my Foodsafe certification, as a first step towards being a business, and also to make sure I wasn’t poisoning friends accidentally.

Foodsafe is something that should be taught annually to teens. Food management is going to be critical in coming years, and a huge component of that is food safety. It’s also a bunch of easy, common sense stuff that makes a ton of sense when you’ve worked around food for a while. The course I took was excellent, and I mentioned my ideas for ice cream businesses to the instructor. While they were very helpful, informative and clearly passionate about doing a tough, thankless job, they outlined the uphill climb I’d need to take as an entrepreneur.

To sell ice cream where I live would require a business license, a vendor’s license if selling direct to the public, and a dairy license if I don’t go vegetarian/vegan. In addition, all ice creams and other foodstuffs would have to be produced in a commissary kitchen, to meet professional hygiene standards. Sooooo, I’d need capital, which is doable. But to secure that capital, it’s likely I’d have to think bigger, with a storefront, or something like that. I’ve struggled over and over with that business model because it’s the opposite of what I’d like to do. I don’t want to produce in large volumes, and I definitely don’t want to charge premium prices for tiny quantities. I don’t know if there’s room for a teeny tiny ice cream producer in the marketplace. Maybe the farmer’s marketplace.

I haven’t reached any conclusions other than that I enjoy making the small batches and giving them out to the people in my spheres. So I’m going to keep doing that, and keeping an eye out for an opportunity to find my way into the marketplace, if I even can. I’d love to give away ice cream, but I also need to make a living. Maybe the two can somehow still come together. Until then, that’s another week in Ice Cream Club. I wish I could reach through the computer screen and plunk some ice cream down in front of you, reader. You’re awesome! Have a great week!

This Week in Ice Cream Club – Ebb and Flow

Hey Ice Cream Club! We’re officially in the last month of Summer now, and for me, that means trying to pack in every moment of sunshine that I can before the weather changes. We’ve had some much-needed rain this week, but it really cools things down and dampens my enthusiasm for making ice cream.

But I still made a few batches, mostly the tail end of my Ruby chocolate supply. The scoops pictured above are the Ruby ice cream. Not so pink. I don’t know if I just didn’t use enough, or if the colour isn’t going to survive being melted and combined with egg yolks and dairy. The yolks especially give it a bit of a yellow colour, which can throw off the pink. I will be getting more Ruby chocolate to experiment with, and I’m going to up the amount I use considerably. I’m also planning to do a vanilla base with Ruby chocolate chunks in it, to really show off what the flavour is like.

I’m hoping to get another foraging trip in, but I’m not optimistic. Unless we get another hot stretch, the berries I pick are likely done for the season. I got a hot tip about some wild strawberries for next summer, though I’m going to try and be more diligent about getting fresh fruit overall. I always feel like I’ve missed out if I get to the end of summer and haven’t gorged on fruit. And recently, turned tons of it into ice creams and sorbets.

The end of summer can be a great opportunity for some really cool ice cream flavours. In previous years, I’ve done pumpkin, apple, and even corn flavoured ice creams. For the pumpkin, I roasted and processed a sweet little sugar pumpkin, though the ice cream was a little fibrous. The spice blend really makes all the difference. Cinnamon, nutmeg, and maybe a touch of cloves are what make pumpkin pies, ice creams and spiced lattes so great. If you’re serving pumpkin pie, a cinnamon and nutmeg spiked vanilla ice cream would be super nice. And some maple syrup poured over top, bourbon optional.

Apple ice creams use a similar spice blend to pumpkin, but it plays a more supporting role. Apples (and pears) have a high water content, and tend to freeze weird. I’ve found cooking them down in caramel in very small pieces to be an okay way to do things, but really processing them down into a jam, apple butter, or even a syrup is probably best. While it may also be tempting to add homemade pie crust bits to an apple ice cream, which I’ve done, I find store-bought vanilla cookies work pretty well, and might hold up better to the ice cream’s moisture content. Depending on cookies/crust, of course. But light and flaky are desirable qualities in pie crust, but are almost impossible to replicate in crust that’s buried deep in frozen dairy.

Corn ice creams have been some of my greatest successes. I had a recent Thanksgiving with pumpkin pie and corn ice cream, and it was to die for. I tried a few different methods, eventually settling on a ‘candy corn’ recipe, using toffee candy bits to add both a sugary pop and some crunch. The freezer life of the crunch is pretty minimal, unfortunately, but if you eat all the ice cream right away, it hardly matters. You can always just sprinkle them on top, too.

Corn ice cream was made by steeping fresh corn in my milk mixture. I sliced the kernels off the cob and then added them and the juice to milk and let it sit overnight. The flavour was really nice. Subtle, but obviously corny. The natural starch in the corn also added a smoothness to the ice cream that was excellent.

I plan to try out a few mixes in the coming weeks, including some more corn ice cream. But first, some of the backlog needs to clear. My freezer is pretty full. Too much ice cream on hand is a pretty good problem to have, but it’s also a good thing for the home-ice-cream-maker to consider, among the overall ebb and flow of making ice cream.

If you have a small machine like mine, you are probably already familiar with the timing required, including freezing your freezer bowl properly and letting your mixes cool overnight. Ice cream on demand is easy to do, but does require a bit of setup. It’s a bit of a rhythm. So too is keeping up the pace of experimentation. Sometimes the freezer fills up, and sometimes you forget to freeze the bowl, and sometimes it’s just cold and dreary out, and nobody wants to eat too much ice cream.

I guess that’s just the balance for all the weeks of intense heat and high demand, when I can’t seem to keep any ice cream around, or taste all the flavours I make. For all the ice cream businesses, a cold week at the end of the summer has got to feel like the touch of winter, even in August.

Most of the ice cream enthusiasts I know would have some on the coldest day of the year, so even while production is probably winding down, it is certainly not winding up. There is still most of a full month of summer, and the beginnings of an autumn season of corn, apples, pumpkins and other fun bases for ice cream. I hope you get some of those last droplets of sunshine yourself, preferably while face-deep in a sundae, cone or banana split. Thanks for reading!

This Week in Ice Cream Club – Forage for the Ages

Hello Ice Cream Club! Today was the hottest day of the year in Vancouver, and I hope yours was a little slice of summer heaven, with some nice ice cream in it somewhere. I’m just about to have myself a little container of probably my favourite frozen treat ever.

This is plain and simple Blackberry sorbet. Blackberries, sugar, a little splash of lemon juice, and water. Perfect. The secret, as with most simple recipes, is quality of ingredients.

Every year for the past few years, I’ve been foraging for Blackberries. There are some in a location near where I used to work. The first year I was tuned in to them, I picked something like 40 pounds, and started churning out sorbets. The first one I made was pretty much the same as the one I’m going to eat. Simple and perfect. I was hooked.

Foraging is a great way to get free food, but should always be approached with caution. Plenty of early foragers back in the beginnings of the Human race were found dead near some enticing berries, or succulent mushrooms. And some still are.

My forage area is long-standing and I’m not the only forager there, but I still wash thoroughly and cook everything I bring home from there. I make a really thick coulis out of the berries, and then either thin it out with water or just as often, with watermelon.

This past week I made a batch of blackberry-watermelon sorbet also, which among friends is known as Julien Jr. Sorbet. Julien Jr. was a notorious long watermelon with a knack for mischief. And was in the first such sorbet.

I’ve seen tons of food tv shows where someone pickles watermelon rind, and in the spirit of things like nose-to-tail and foraging philosophies, I decided to do it myself. I did a small batch flavoured with cinnamon, clove and black peppercorns. It was great, but too Christmas for me. Today I did a serious batch with jars and everything. They look great.

I’m a sucker for dill pickles, so these have garlic and dill in them instead of cinnamon and clove. I kept the peppercorns. I’m excited to try these with pulled pork later this week.

Last week I bought some Ruby Chocolate from my local Purdy’s store. So sort of like foraging for ingredients. The aim was to simply try it and see what it was like, and how it behaved, and what ice cream stuff I could do with it.

So far, I’ve made 3 batches, and churned one. The others were just made today. Nobody has tasted any yet, so I don’t have any feedback other than my own. For the record, I did 2 bars per batch. The bars are 50g each. I also did vanilla extract in each batch. It doesn’t mess with the chocolate flavour, and even gives it a nice roundness. I’m convinced that a teeny bit of alcohol makes ice cream extra special. I think it’s because it won’t freeze, and helps with the element of softness in the ice cream.

I melted the Ruby bars over a double boiler (Bain-Marie for the purists) and they melted down beautifully, just like any other chocolate. They also retained their colour… until I mixed the melted chocolate into my custard mix. I’m not sure if it will happen every time, or if I just didn’t use enough of the chocolate, but the mix went beige. I add egg yolks, too, and that doesn’t help. It’s a nice, appetizing beige, but it’s not the glorious pink I was hoping for.

I tasted the mix, and it’s got a super nice, rich Ruby Chocolate flavour. It has this fruitiness that’s sort of like that of dried fruit like raisins or cherries. It’s ideal as ice cream, because the flavour is so forward and uninterrupted. I do plan on trying this again, and using more bars in an attempt to make the mix more pink.

That does it for me for this week! I’m hoping to get another foraging trip in over the next few days, and I’ll be churning Ruby mixes too. It’s supposed to be a scorcher, but wherever you are, hot, cold or Goldilocks zone, stay safe, wear sunscreen, eat ice cream, and look out for the people around you. Stay frosty!

This Week in Ice Cream Club – Fermentation Nation

Hey out there Ice Cream Club! Another week has gone by, and I have ice cream stuff to talk about. This week I used various forms of fermentation to my advantage, and took advantage of some local ingredients. Let’s talk frozen desserts!

I started out the week by churning a pair of chocolate ice creams. I took my basic recipe and added cocoa, which is actually a new thing for me. I’ve made dozens of chocolate ice creams, but they have always been made by melting chips, bars, or discs into my custard mixture. I have the chips on hand a lot for baking, and I like that approach just fine, although I find there is often a bit of chocolate grit that is unwilling to melt, even when pushed through my strainer.

This time, however, I wanted to try cocoa. The recipe for hot chocolate on the back of the cylinder was my guideline, and I went with 1 (heaping!) tsp per cup of milk used. I had a bit of a brain cramp and forgot that I also use cream. Oops. One thing I’ve learned from making a lot of ice cream is that you want as much flavour power in your custard mix as possible because the cream is like a big wet blanket that covers a lot of it up.

Once the ice cream was churned, the flavour of chocolate was there. Present. Nice. Really nice, actually. Super smooth and even. Much less sugary. Next time I’d add an additional heaping tsp for each cup of cream used. Overall, 1 per cup dairy.

I did one batch of chocolate with standard grocery-store-brand sandwich cookies, and one with a cherry chocolate truffle bar I found on sale at the same grocery. I usually do small, single-serve ice cream portions in recycled fruit cup containers for friends and guests (cleaning and sanitizing these is way too much of my life, but it’s a labour of love), and I chunked up the bar and put a balanced amount of chunks in each portion. If I just mixed it in randomly before portioning it out, it’s likely there’d be a couple at the end with no chunks. Reviews have been very positive.

One other wrinkle with the chocolate mixes was when it came to using an extract. Typically, ice cream has vanilla in it. You can even put it in chocolate ice cream, and it tastes great. It gives the ice cream a nice, complete flavour. I don’t recommend trying it, but imagine vanilla ice cream without vanilla. There’s very little in there, but the difference it makes is gigantic. I’ve often substituted other extracts to make mint ice cream and such, and have found that liqueurs and flavoured alcohols can stand in, too. I plan on testing this further, but for my chocolate base, I used some Root Beer Schnapps from boozy float night a few weeks back. It was a fantastic add, both rounding out the flavour and giving it a touch of mystery.

Later in the week, I brought home yet another watermelon, because watermelons. I’m trying to really get nose-to-tail with these melons, and we turn them into snack portions, debris, and now strips of rind. After seeing much-celebrated pickled watermelon rind on cooking shows time and again, I finally tried it myself. Awesome. I used a flavouring that included cinnamon, clove, black pepper and rice vinegar. It was very sweet, but really interesting, and the acid helps cut through the sweet. The texture is like a juicy, floppy pickle slice. Really satisfying.

The watermelon debris mentioned in the previous paragraph is what I used to make the base for blueberry balsamic watermelon sorbet. I’ve used leftover fruit platter watermelon to do this too, but any fresh watermelon works. When you use a fruit that has water-rich flesh, like the melon family (including canteloupes, honeydews, etc.) and even cucumbers, as a sorbet base, it almost freezes into sorbet by itself. All I add to a base of blended watermelon is a fruit coulis, which is pretty much a sauce, or loose jam.

This time I had some blueberries from nearby Abbotsford, and while I was making a coulis out of them, had the bright idea to add a healthy splash of balsamic vinegar. The coulis, for the record, was just berries, water and sugar, and the balsamic instantly gave it a kick, a funk, and a floral mystique. It worked really well with the natively floral tones among the blueberries, and gave the whole sorbet a sophisticated feel to it. I made a double batch of the sorbet, and will be churning another today.

The ice creams (and sorbets) in my immediate future all revolve around ‘local’ ingredients. Some grow here, like the blackberries I’ve been foraging for annually for about 3 years. They’re just about ready, and this is the week I think I’ll be picking. They’ll mostly go into sorbets with watermelon, because the combo is amazing.

The other ‘local’ ingredient is already in my freezer. Purdy’s, a chocolate company with 2 locations in my neighbourhood, has reopened, and is selling their Ruby Chocolate again. I picked some up to try in ice cream. We tried some just for eating, and it was interesting. It tastes like chocolate-covered raisins, or even yogurt-covered raisins. I’m looking forward to reporting on things like how it melts, integrates into ice cream, and works as the primary flavour profile. Very cool. It should be a really awesome colour.

Keep cool this week, Ice Cream Club. Wearing a mask in public might mean that you can’t walk around with a cone and a couple of scoops, but it’s a small price to pay to keep healthy and safe. And you can just enjoy ice cream at home! Thanks for reading!

This Week in Ice Cream Club

Hey Internet! It’s been a while since I posted here, and I’m trying to get back in the habit again. I’m going to start with a format that worked for me a while ago at my old job. That was where I ran the initial Ice Cream Club for my coworkers. I sent out a weekly newsletter that accompanied the ice cream I brought to work, so they could know what was what, and what was in what, etc. I would love to share my ice cream with you, reader, but hopefully reading about it will be cool too.

So, this week in ice cream club was kind of a return to the basics. My basic recipe is designed to make 4 batches out of a standard 2L carton of milk, a 1L carton of cream, and 12 eggs. So, armed with those ingredients I made 4 batches.

2 have been churned already and are ready to eat in my freezer. I did a classic Cookies n’ Cream, using the basic vanilla base and grocery store sandwich cookies. I chop them up with a stainless steel apple cutter. It makes for nice big chunks.

I also did the same but with chopped up chocolate bars in place of cookies. The bars I chose are a coffee and wafer kind of thing. There’s a predominant brand, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. I find off-brand is usually (but not always) fine when you can get it, and that usually means cheaper. Getting bulk items is probably less of thing with the epidemic on now, but that works too.

The other two batches are both chocolate instead of vanilla-based. I used cocoa powder instead of melted chips, which I usually do. It should be less sugary overall, and smoother. I plan to do a batch with the sandwich cookies, for Chocolate Cookies n’ Cream, and I’m not 100% on the other one yet. I’m hoping I’ll be inspired by something. I had a cherry chocolate bar recently that would be nice.

Earlier this week, I also churned a batch of Blackberry Watermelon Sorbet. I made a blackberry coulis with local blackberries, water and sugar syrup. Then I blended it with watermelon at a ratio of about 50/50. Then it was churned. Simple and effective. I’ve subbed other melons for the watermelon, and it works. Consider adding a bit of liquid. Cucumber can be used too, though you’ll taste it. I really like it, personally, but not everyone else has.

As far as next week goes, I’ll be churning the chocolate mixes ASAP. Maybe one tonight, and one tomorrow morning. I also have 12 egg whites left over from this week’s batches, since I only use the yolks, and that means I’m going to make an Angel Food Cake. I made one a few weeks ago and it turned out pretty well. I little rubbery, a little sticky, and tough to get out of the bundt pan I used to bake it in. I know I was in the wrong, but I had to try.

Since the weather is officially hot, I’ll probably be making more mixes too. I have been bringing home watermelons, so there should at least be a sorbet or two.

Finally, while I was on an errand yesterday, I noticed Purdy’s Chocolates has reopened at least one nearby location. Right before the lockdown, I was introduced to the concept of Ruby Chocolate on the Purdy’s-sponsored The Great Chocolate Showdown, but didn’t get to a Purdy’s in time to try it. I definitely plan to do that this week, and share the results.

Keep cool, Ice Cream Club!

Ice Cream Ambition

Ice Cream Ambition is where you’ll find the next step for the ice cream enthusiast. Things like selling your product, licenses, food safety, and regional requirements will be covered, but it’s not all red tape. Fun suggestions for catering, and even elaborate recipes will be here.