This Shit Is (Roasted) B.A.N.A.N.A.S.

Another ice cream from The Perfect Scoop. This roasted banana ice cream was super easy. However, I thought that it was a little too sweet. I didn't even use the ripest bananas and it was too sweet. Next time I will leave out the additional two tablespoons of white sugar and just stick with the brown sugar that the bananas get roasted with. Not even all that sugar got into the ice cream, a good amount of it burnt during the roasting. Another variation from the recipe was my omission of lemon juice, just because I didn't have any.

To start off I cut up three bananas and roasted them with some brown sugar and a little butter. Once the banana slices where finished cooking I put them into a blender along with the caramel that they were cooking in, being careful not to add the totally burnt bits. I blended the bananas and caramel and then added milk, vanilla, and salt. That's pretty much it. The mixture went into the fridgerator to cool and I went to my room to watch some shitty movie. When the movie was over and the ice cream mixture had cooled I poured the mixture into my machine and let it do its thing.

I gotta say, just tossing a bunch of shit into a blender isn't really that much fun. They all come out great, and it's good to get away from the egg heavy custards, but they take 5 minutes to make. I cook when I'm bored. And I need way more then 5 minutes distraction. So, I guess I have to find some more time consuming stuff.

Dedicated to Vinh Van Tran.

I followed a recipe for Vietnamese coffee ice cream that I got from David Lebovitz's book The Perfect Scoop. I was looking forward to this because all there is to it is making coffee and mixing shit. And its always nice to develop some non-custard styles. I fucking love Vietnamese coffee, and having never made an ice cream with real coffee I was eager to get to it. Usually I use instant coffee. This ice cream had such a stronger coffee taste I will never use the instant again. I was hesitant to use actual coffee because I thought adding all the coffee would thin out the ice cream into more of an ice, but it was well worth any textural thinness for the taste. The ice cream came out great anyway, not too thin or icy.

The first step was to make one and a half cups of strong espresso. That was easy enough. Once the espresso cooled down I mixed it with condensed milk and half and half. I let that cool in the fridge over night and froze it up in the morning. The recipe called for some fine ground coffee to be mixed in, but I opted out of that.