A Dimension Of Perfectly Ordinary Vanilla.

They say the classics never go out of style, so today I made a classic vanilla ice cream. I started by tossing two split and halved vanilla beans into about a cup and a half of milk, heated it to just before a boil and let the vanilla beans steep in the milk for 20 minutes. The only reason I halved the beans was because they were too long to fit in my pot, otherwise simply splitting them lengthwise would be enough.


As the end of the twenty minutes approached I separated out the yolks from the eggs that had been sitting out, warming up to room temperature. The yolks were placed in a mixing bowl along with some sugar and whipped together.
Today, I have decided to make a change in my basic recipe. I have been thinking about it, and from now on I am going to add one more egg yolk to my custard. From now on I will use seven yolks. This is a purely "superstitious" addition. I hope the addition to "lucky" seven yolks will improve the power of my ice creams. The perfection of the egg will now be increased with the godly symmetry of seven.


After the twenty minutes had elapsed I removed the vanilla beans from the milk. I added some of the warm milk to the egg mixture a little bit at a time, and then poured that mixture back into the warm milk and slowly cooked it for a few more minutes until my custard was cooked.
While the custard was cooking I scraped the seeds from the beans and put them back into the custard. When it was finished cooking I strained the custard and allowed it to cool. Once the custard had cooled I added some heavy cream and threw the mixture into my machine.




"...a fallacy that is becoming more and more widespread, and that is that unfamiliar things are more interesting than familiar things. The argument being that familiarity with an object exhausts the object, we know all there is to know about it, and it holds nothing further for us. Nothing could be more mistaken. The less we know about an object, the more primitive the concepts by means of which we try to grasp it... As the sounds become more usual, so the listener is invited to penetrate more and more into them. In this way something unfamiliar is brought home."
-Cornelius Cardew