Sweet Potato.

Hopefully this will be the last Perfect Scoop ice cream I make for a while. Not that they aren't awesomely delicious, I just think I need to get back to original custards.

I started this ice cream by cutting a couple of sweet potatoes into cubes and boiling them until they became soft. The cooked potatoes were put into the blender along with some milk, brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, salt, and lemon juice. That was all blended up, strained, and chilled. A few hours later this mixture went in to the ice cream machine. Done. Super easy.

Peanut Butter.

Another super easy toss shit in the blender and freeze ice cream from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. I put peanut butter, vanilla, salt, milk, cream, and a little sugar into the blender and mixed it around until it was smooth. The mixture went in the fridgerator for a while and then into the ice cream machine. It came out great, really rich, with an unmistakable peanut butterness to it.

I made this by request for my pal Kara. It was her birthday. She went to the pacific northwest with Nate the next day, and in between seeing Lady Gaga and doing hoodrat shit, she got me a mug from Tweed's Cafe. I really appreciate this. Twedes is the Double R diner from Twin Peaks. I needed a mug, Kara didn't even know this, and Twin Peaks is the third best television show of all time, so I was pretty pumped.

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.

Inverted Root Beer Floats.

This ice cream was super simple. If you remember back to the coke custard, you will remember that I reduced cans of soda on the stove in order to get a syrup. I was pretty disappointed with the lack of a strong cola flavor that time, so this time I got a couple of cups of syrup from a soda fountain. Acquiring that syrup was probably the most difficult part of this custard. But, even that wasn't too hard. Big thanks to Lil' Nora!

The custard started the same as always. The only change this time was no sugar. Because the root beer syrup was mostly sugar I didn't want to add any more sugar to the custard. In fact I was a little concerned that the syrup would be too sweet.

So... a sugarless custard was made with six egg yolks and milk. Once the custard cooled I added the syrup and cream. I then poured it all into the machine. The syrup was very sweet and I was concerned that the more root beer flavor I added the more sugar I was adding. The final custard wasn't too sweet, but It wasn't as intense a root beer flavor as I would have liked. The custard was obviously root beer flavored, I was just looking for a more intense flavor. Next time I suppose I will try an extract, maybe a combination of syrup and extract.

This was the first time I had used an inverted sugar in my ice cream. Ironic that it was for inverted root beer floats. Anyway, the sugar caused the finished custard to be really smooth and ready to scoop right out of the freezer. I was a little worried when it was freezing (or actually not freezing) that it wouldn't get firm enough. But I figured it would firm up once I packed it up into the containers and let it freeze more in the freezer. This is what happen when alcohol is added to ice cream as well and that's never much of an issue so I didn't really sweat it. The only problem it brought up was knowing when to stop the machine. I can usually tell by sight or ear, hearing the machine start to slow down due to the custard firming up.

When the time was right I scooped the root beer ice cream into glasses of vanilla soda.

Oatmeal with Whiskey Soaked Raisins.

This one started a little different, I poured some whiskey over the raisins and let them soak that shit up as I got busy with the rest of the ice cream.

I started by making a pot of oatmeal, using half milk and half cream. A good amount of salt and some cinnamon sticks were added as the oatmeal cooked. Once the oats were fully cooked I allowed them to cool and removed the cinnamon.


As the oats cooled I made a custard. The regular mixture of egg yolks, sugar and milk were cooked in the usual way. As some milk gets heated, the sugar and egg yolks get mixed together. Then that mixture gets tempered with some of the hot milk. The warm egg mixture goes back in with the rest of the hot milk and is allowed to finish cooking for a few minutes. Once the custard was cooked it was mixed with the oats and some vanilla.


The custard mixture cooled in the fridgerator until it was time to freeze. I didn't add any additional cream, as the oats sort of took the place of that part of the custard. Once the custard was put into the machine the plumped raisins were drained. About two thirds of the way through we added the whiskey soaked raisins.
The texture was great. Little chewy oats are probably the best textured "add - in" I have come across so far. The flavor was right on. maybe a little too much vanilla, but that isnt really a problem. It tasted just like a slightly sweet bowl of oatmeal.
Eventually I got to share it.

Peaches.

I know peaches aren't in season yet, but I had a craving. I started getting the hankering after using some peach flavored paraphernalia. Usually I stay with the classics but sometimes a little extra flavor is good. Because they aren't in season, I thought I would be using frozen peaches but I couldn't find frozen peaches at the store so I got some of those little cups of cut up peaches in light syrup.



I opened up the peaches and strained the syrup off them. While the peaches drained in the sink I got started on the custard. I made a pretty straight forward custard. Milk, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla got cooked up in the usual way; heat the milk, whip the sugar and yolks, when the milk gets hot enough mix some into the yolk mixture and return this mixture to the rest of the milk and heat for a minute. Once I took the custard off the heat I returned my attention to the peaches, pureeing them and then adding the peaches to the custard. A little vanilla was also added at this point. I let the custard cool in the fridge overnight while I returned to a thoroughly satisfying 21 Jumpstreet marathon.


In the morning I added some cream to the peach custard and froze it. When it was finished with the freezing process I mixed more peaches into one of the pints (for Kate) and left the others smooth. I'm looking forward to fresh peaches.