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Brown Sugar Nectarine Ice Cream

21 Aug

As a child, I thought that making ice cream at home was the type of thing only early American pioneers did. Ice cream came from the store, or an ice cream shop, and it was packaged in a square container that opened up like an envelope from the front. (I cannot be the only person here who remembers ice cream being packaged in this manner, can I? The flimsy box, the tight corners that held onto the ice cream and resisted being nudged out by a rounded scoop? In terms of ice cream package technology, whoever thought to ditch the box with square corners and develop a more rounded package was a genius.) When, in the book Farmer Boy, Almanzo Wilder and his siblings were left to their own devices after their parents left town for a week and deemed the children to be in charge of the farm, what was the first thing the kids did? They made ice cream (and cake, and candy…and then more cake and ice cream). They made so much ice cream and sweet treats, in fact, that they almost completely emptied out the family’s sugar barrel.

Reading about this intense feat of sugar consumption practically gave me a contact high. Making ice cream at home? For dinner? You can imagine how compelling I found this idea (I was going to add in the words “as a child,” but, let’s face it, I sort of like that idea now as well). It seemed so rugged, and yet also so simple. I want some ice cream, so I’ll just make some. It was like reading about the secrets behind a magic trick.

Obviously, as I got older and became in charge of my own kitchen and what went on in it, I found out that making homemade ice cream was just about as simple as eating homemade ice cream. Once I was gifted an ice cream maker, it was like having a license to print money. Somehow, it seems almost sneaky to make your own ice cream , like you’re totally getting away with doing something that’s meant to be handled only by the likes of professionals. It is also, I have found, slightly addictive. Not just the ice cream itself, I mean, but making the ice cream. Every time I find myself in possession of some interesting chocolate or chilies (or both, because, man have you ever had spicy chocolate ice cream? SO GOOD), or a nice supply of super ripe fruit, my mind immediately turns to thoughts of transforming those goods into a creamy batch of ice cream.

Last week, when it was 95 degrees in Portland, we had just gotten back from our annual trip to San Francisco, where we ate ice cream nearly every single day. This year we rented an apartment across the street from a great gelato place, which meant that we ended up spending an inordinate amount of time there, filling our bellies with gelato. We also, as we do every year, spent a great deal of time getting ice cream form Bi-Rite Creamery, as any ice cream loving person should know to do. I am a huge fan of their brown sugar ice cream with a ginger caramel swirl, so, once we got home to Portland and the heat left me no other choice but to make ice cream, I decided to test drive their brown sugar concept with some fresh nectarines. It’s usually my habit to plump up the flavor of fresh fruit with a bit of lemon juice, but, in the interest of trying something new, I subbed in some lime juice instead. What emerged after my tinkering was a creamy, bright, delightful ice cream with the strong flavor of nectarines balanced by a gentle undertone of sweetness. It was wonderful. It is wonderful. And I suggest you grab yourself an ice cream maker and find out for yourself.

Ice cream, previously: Fresh Ginger Ice Cream, Six Threes Ice Cream, Coconut Lime Frozen Yogurt and Chewy Ginger Cookie Sandwiches

Brown Sugar Nectarine Ice Cream Recipe

1 ¼ pounds pitted, diced ripe nectarines (about 3 large)

1/4 cup water

½ cup light brown sugar

3 egg yolks

1 cup heavy cream

½ cup milk

juice of ½ a lime

¼ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

In a medium saucepan, combine nectarines and water. Bring to a boil, cover, then allow to simmer over medium heat for 8-10 minutes, until the nectarines have broken down and released a great deal of their juices. Set aside to cool.

While the nectarines are cooking, combine brown sugar, egg yolks, and heavy cream in a medium saucepan. Whisk to combine, then heat mixture over medium heat, whisking constantly, until mixture thickens and reaches a temperature of around 170 degrees F. The mixture should coat the back of a spoon, leaving a clean trail when swiped with a finger. Remove from heat, whisk in milk, then place in the refrigerator to cool.

When both mixtures have cooled, combine them in a blender or food processor and blend on high speed until completely smooth and combined. Stir in lime juice and vanilla, then refrigerate until complete cooled, about 2 hours. Alternately, if you don’t want to wait, you can place the nectarine custard mixture in a thin, nonreactive metal bowl, place the metal bowl in larger bowl filled with mostly ice with a bit of water, and stir the mixture as the metal bowl rests in its ice bath. After about 10-15 minutes of careful stirring (being careful not to tip the custard bowl over into the ice water), the mixture will become quite cold.

Freeze mixture in ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s directions.

Makes just under 1 quart of ice cream.

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Coconut Lime Frozen Yogurt and Chewy Ginger Cookie Sandwiches

10 May

As tough as it was for me to find a name for these astonishingly delicious treats (that title is almost more of a mouthful than the actual cookie sandwich), the path from idea to reality was a surprisingly simple one.  As often as I have ideas about dishes and flavor combinations I think would be great, only to have them never really work out in the end, no matter my efforts (there might be an entire article I can write about this phenomenon, which I may dub “Foods that Never Were”), it is always a great boon to my cooking inclinations when I can manage to make something work itself out on the first go around.  These frozen yogurt sandwiches came into being at just the right time.

It doesn’t take much to make the people of Portland move from cold weather doldrums to sheer, unadulterated excitement over the promise of a warm, sunny day.  All I have to do is hear someone casually mention that it might not rain for a few days and my brain wanders over to thoughts of picnics, hammocks, and tall, ice-filled glasses, their sides mottled by drops of condensation.  If it seems the warm weather might take a trip north of 70 degrees, I start to hover around the cabinet where I keep the ice cream maker, waiting in earnest for a cue—any cue—that will allow me to unearth my old friend and start welcoming the cold treats we so crave on warm days.

Striking the perfect balance of cool and creamy against chewy and crunchy, I can’t think of a better invitation to celebrate summer than having a batch of these ice cream sandwiches sitting in your freezer, waiting for the perfect moment to accompany you in a lounge chair or on a picnic blanket.  The tropical notes of the lime and coconut yogurt make fast friends with the wonderful ginger bite of the cookies that envelop it, making this an ice cream sandwich for the ages.  As an added bonus, and as any fellow fan of the frozen sandwich will hear and, no doubt, applaud, the wonderfully chewy ginger cookies that hold this sandwich together are sturdy enough to keep their shape throughout the entire life of the sandwich, but never do they impede one’s efforts to bite through the sandwich.  Crisp, yet with gentle give, they are the perfect bookends to an equally perfect treat.

Last Year: New Potato and Caramelized Leek Tart in an Olive Oil Crust

Coconut Lime Frozen Yogurt and Chewy Ginger Cookie Sandwiches Recipe

Some of you may remember these ginger cookies from a post a few months ago.  That’s how I remembered them, and that’s how I came to conclude that, with their fantastic chewiness and great ginger flavor, they’d be the perfect match for this ice cream treat.  The recipe for the cookies is the same here, only the size of each cookie is obviously larger, and the baking time adjusted accordingly.

A note on the yogurt choice: you’ve got to go Greek yogurt on this one.  The creaminess and texture of Greek yogurt are unparalleled here, and really make the frozen yogurt that much more luxurious.  If you’re afraid of the fat content in Greek yogurt (which is fine, it’s a perfectly reasonable concern), I’ll have you know that I accidentally ended up with non-fat Greek yogurt when I was making this (did you even know that there was such a thing as non-fat Greek yogurt? I had no idea), and I never even suspected it was fat-free until I was pitching the yogurt cups in the recycling bin later on in the day and noticed the designation on the label.  The taste gave nothing away.  So, Greek yogurt is a must, and full or non-fat are both fine.

Coconut Lime Frozen Yogurt

18 ounces (just a tad north of 2 cups) plain Greek yogurt

1 heaping tablespoon finely grated fresh lime zest

½ cup unsweetened coconut milk

2/3 cup granulated sugar

In a large bowl, or in a large measuring cup, combine all ingredients.  Whisk vigorously together for 1 minute, thoroughly combining.  Allow the mixture to rest for about 5 minutes to really let the sugar dissolve, then vigorously whisk once more for at least a minute, making sure that everything is fully incorporated.

Freeze in ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s directions.  When yogurt has frozen, remove from ice cream maker and pack into a freezer-safe tub.  Place frozen yogurt in freezer for at least an hour to allow it to firm up just a bit more before assembling ice cream sandwiches.

Chewy Ginger Thin Cookies

¾ cup unsalted butter

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 beaten egg

¼ cup molasses (dark or light are both fine)

1 ½ cups sifted unbleached all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground powdered ginger

pinch nutmeg

1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, egg, and molasses.  Combine the flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, powdered ginger, and nutmeg, and sift together directly onto the butter mixture.  Stir until smooth.  Add the fresh ginger, then mix to combine.

Using a pastry bag or a Ziploc bag with a bottom corner cut off (the dough is extremely sticky, so trying to portion it out with a spoon won’t work well at all), pipe or squeeze out cookies into circles roughly 3 inches across onto a parchment-lined baking sheet.  Place each cookie about 1 inch apart, lest they stick together as they spread during baking.

Bake cookies on the center rack of the oven for 8 to 9 minutes, until the edges of the cookies have just begun to appear slightly darkened and dry.  While the cookies are baking, pipe another batch of cookies onto your second prepared baking sheet.

Cool baked cookies on their parchment sheet placed on a wire rack.  When cookies have cooled on a rack for about 5 minutes are and no longer gooey, you can slip the cookies right off of the parchment and reuse the parchment for another batch of cookies.

The desired consistency for these cookies is super chewy but ever-so-slightly firm (they will be very bendy when they come out of the oven, and will become soft-firm when cooled).  If you find your cookies are persistently floppy even after having sufficiently cooled, increase the baking time of subsequent batches by 1 minute.

To Assemble and Wrap Frozen Yogurt Sandwiches:

Allow cookies to cool completely.  Place a cookie on a piece of plastic wrap.  Scoop desired amount of frozen yogurt on top of cookie, leaving a bit of open space around the edges of each cookie to allow for settling.  Place another cookie on top of the frozen yogurt, and gently press down until the frozen yogurt settles a bit and the top cookie starts to adhere.  Wrap the plastic wrap around the sandwich and place in the freezer to allow to firm up a bit, ideally for a couple of hours.  There is, of course, nothing stopping you from eating a frozen yogurt sandwich as soon as you assemble it, but allowing the sandwiches to rest in the freezer for a bit really does help them keep their shape while you eat them.

Assemble all sandwiches until yogurt is gone.  You will have cookies left over, but this is a good thing.

Makes 12-15 sandwiches, depending on how much yogurt you desire to put in between the cookies.

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Gelato vs. Ice Cream, the Battle in Which There Are No Losers

20 Aug

As a quick side note concerning last month’s annual trek to San Francisco, it bears sharing that we engaged in a voracious debate concerning which icy treat was more favorable: ice cream or gelato.

St. James Whiskey gelato, topped with a scoop of apricot sorbetto, from Naia in North Beach

In reality, there are very few properties that separate gelato from ice cream.  Both are icy treats made from milk and cream, both are churned while freezing, and both can be served via cone or cup.  The main differences between gelato and ice cream lie in three areas: the ratio of milk to cream contained in each (gelato contains less cream, more milk, resulting in a marginally lower fat product with a less heavy taste), the amount of air contained within each (gelato is churned more slowly than ice cream, which allows less air to be incorporated into the mix and makes for a denser end product), and the temperature at which each item is served (gelato is served at a temperature slightly above freezing, ice cream is served frozen).

Chocolate ice cream from Bi-Rite Creamery in the Misson

Facts sorted and items sampled, we considered our tastings.  Bi-Rite Creamery, by making its ice cream in very small batches, maintains a virtue similar to that of most gelato makers (okay, so I recant my above statement about there being three main differences between gelato and ice cream–there are actually four main differences, that being that gelato is meant to be made in very small batches, and ice cream, unless made at home or at an artisanal ice cream shop like Bi-Rite Creamery, is generally not).  Both Naia and Bi-Rite Creamery offer a selection of sorbets, and both places excel at making delicious, unique flavors of their product (I would have taken a picture of the balsamic strawberry ice cream, salted caramel ice cream, and brown sugar ice cream with a ginger caramel swirl that were consumed during this sampling of icy treats,  but I was, delightfully, too busy tasting them to even think about my camera).

In the end, ice cream and gelato were declared dual winners in the unofficial competition.  Not only were we unable to choose a winner between the two frozen delights, but we were unwilling.  To declare one better over the other seemed an almost ridiculous task, especially when, as evidenced below, we found it virtually impossible to register a single complaint about either.

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