3 ounces cold-brew coffee concentrate – Trader Joe’s makes a very good one.
6 ounces half & half
1 ounce simple syrup
frozen coffee (see below)
dark chocolate, frozen (optional)
Coffee Ice
The secret to truly excellent ice coffee is coffee ice.
We’ve all been there, really, truly enjoying a cup of iced coffee on a bone-deep level. Not guzzling it — we’ve been around the block a few times, and we know that an ice cream headache is a real danger in situations like this, but we’ve also learned the hard way that we don’t make great decisions after ingesting an injudiciously large caffeine bolus.
So we nurse our iced coffee.
The first sip is transcendent.
The second one, 10 minutes later, is still pretty good.
After half an hour, we ask ourselves if it was really that good to begin with. Right now, it’s only so-so.
It eventually sinks in that the enemy here is the ice, gradually, subtly diluting the iced coffee, like an unwanted watery chaperone.
The secret is to make your ice out of coffee. Pieces of coffee ice will melt, but when they do, do you know what they add to your iced coffee? More coffee!
Use leftover coffee to make ice cubes, or make some with cold-brew concentrate.
But it isn’t the 1970s. What if you don’t have an ice cube tray?
Do you have a cake pan? Or a large zip-lock bag? Use one of those to make a block of ice, then chop it up with an ice pick.
But this isn’t a suspense movie; what if you don’t have an ice pick?
Wrap the ice in a tea towel, and swing it over your head, smashing it into the kitchen counter. Do this three or four times and you will have your choice of smashed ice — from coffee snow, to jagged coffee-sicles, to chunks of frozen coffee that will take up half your glass. Use what you want, then put the rest in a Tupperware container in the freezer for your next, inevitable iced coffee.
The actual iced coffee
The question here is how much restraint do you want to show with your iced coffee? The amounts here will make a very respectable 16-ounce serving. Maybe you only need a little pick-me-up. Maybe you have guests. Maybe you have in-laws staying with you. There are any number of reasons why you might want to drink a reasonable, temperate amount of iced coffee.
But maybe you are alone, or Having. A. Day. Maybe the kids or your boss are making extremely unreasonable demands. Maybe you need to drink enough iced coffee to stun a water buffalo. I’m not here to judge you.
The important thing to keep in mind here is the proportions. A one-quart glass jar would work just as well as a juice glass for this.
Pick a glass, then fill it halfway with coffee ice.
Add the half & half and cold-brew concentrate in a 2:1 ratio.
Add enough simple syrup to sweeten to taste.
Stir.
Using a microplane grater, or the tiniest holes on your box grater, grate frozen dark chocolate on top of your coffee, as garnish.
If you think you don’t like iced coffee, you might want to try this. It is creamy and slightly sweet. It isn’t a takeout milkshake pretending to be iced coffee. It’s the real thing. It’s delicately sweet, without much of the bitterness that mass-produced ice coffee tends to have. It starts out pretty innocent, whistling and looking up at the ceiling, but over the course of an hour it becomes more and more grown-up coffee.
Making homemade ice cream isn’t all that difficult. It’s pretty much as complicated as baking — if you follow directions, you’ve got about a 92 percent chance (a statistic I just made up) of pulling off any recipe.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind, though:
1. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that making ice cream is cheaper than buying it. Even if you have any exotic ingredients already on hand, the cream alone will cost you as much as a pint of the high-end store stuff. Also, reconcile yourself to the fact that the ice cream you make might be as good as ice cream made by professionals, but it will probably not be better. The people who make ice cream for a living have it literally down to a science. They wouldn’t be able to stay in business otherwise.
The only good reason to make your own ice cream is to get something that you can’t find easily. Good luck finding a vegan rhubarb-ripple sorbet in the store, but it would not be too difficult to make yourself.
2. Almost all of us have been given the advice to never read the comments at the bottom of any article online. This is especially true of recipes posted there. Of course, I’m not terribly bright, and I tend to ignore that advice when I’m looking for a new recipe.
“I know people can be awful,” I’ll say to myself, “but who could be awful about banana bread?”
Dian from Tulsa apparently, who posts a response to the recipe that goes something like: I thought I would try this, but my husband doesn’t really like bananas, so I replaced them with ketchup, and we’re trying to cut back on the amount of sugar we eat, so I left that out. Also, I’m not really sure what gluten is, but I worry about it, so I replaced half of the flour with sand. Really, I’m disappointed with how this turned out. I won’t be making it again. One Star.
A lot of us are used to playing around with recipes, and making adjustments and substitutions as we go when we are cooking, but have learned the hard way not to mess too much with the ingredients when we bake. Eggs, flour, fat and baking powder perform specific jobs, chemistry-wise, and most of us eventually learn not to play around with a baking recipe until we know it well and understand what each ingredient does.
Ice cream is much the same. Sugar is not just there for sweetness; it plays a role in how hard the ice cream will freeze and at what temperature. The same goes for the dairy, or lack of it. If you decide on a whim to replace heavy cream with fat-free oat milk, the finished ice cream will be very different from what the writer had in mind when she developed the recipe. Until you have made a particular ice cream or sorbet a few times and are really comfortable with it, it’s best to follow the recipe. With that said, many of the recipes here are inspired by ones from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop (2007, Ten Speed Press). He is a genius, and his recipes are bulletproof.
So why are certain ingredients included in a recipe in particular ratios?
Let’s make some ice cream while we talk about that. Again, one of the best reasons for making your own ice cream is to get a finished product that you won’t be able to buy easily. I like this combination of brown sugar and sour cream.
Brown Sugar Sour Cream Ice Cream
Brown Sugar Sour Cream Ice Cream. Photo by John Fladd.
1 cup (250 ml) whole milk
1 cup (150 grams) brown sugar
1 teaspoon molasses (optional)
pinch of salt
5 egg yolks
scant 2 cups (480 grams) full-fat sour cream
1 chocolate chip Clif Bar
Step 1: Combine the milk, brown sugar, molasses and salt in a small saucepan.
The milk provides a base to suspend other ingredients in. A lot of flavors bond themselves well to fat or alcohol. In this recipe we don’t want to mess around with alcohol, because that will affect how the ice cream freezes, but the fat in the milk (about 4 percent) will not only grab hold of the flavor of the brown sugar at a molecular level; it will also help keep the ice crystals small when you freeze it, giving the finished product a creamier consistency. The molasses amplifies the flavor of the brown sugar.
Step 1.5: At this point you need to make a choice: What will you do with the egg yolks?
Egg yolks play a couple of roles here. One is to add fat and protein, which gives the finished ice cream a richer, creamier mouth-feel (an actual industry term). The other is to act as an emulsifier; it helps bond the fat in the recipe — and let’s face it, there’s a lot of it — to the other ingredients. You know the saying that oil and water don’t mix? That’s actually true, so in recipes where you need to use something fatty and something watery — salad dressing, for instance — an emulsifier is used to pull everything together. In the salad dressing, it might be mustard. Here it’s the egg yolks.
The problem with using egg yolks is that they need to be cooked but not too cooked. Nobody wants chunks of scrambled eggs in their ice cream.
There are two ways around this.
The traditional way is something called “tempering.” (If you already know about tempering, skip down to No. 2.) You might have seen this in other sorts of recipes. You heat up a liquid — the milk and sugar, in this case — to just below boiling, then spoon a tiny bit of the liquid into a small bowl with the egg yolks, stirring vigorously. You repeat this several times, simultaneously diluting the egg yolks and gradually bringing them up to temperature. After doing this four or five times, you stir the egg mixture into the milk mixture and whisk it enthusiastically. You keep stirring it until — and here’s the kicker — “the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.” It is an instruction that you get in almost any traditional custard recipe, but it can be tricky; I mess it up maybe 40 percent of the time.
The other option is to cheat. Whisk the egg yolks into the milk mixture while they are all still cold, then, whisking constantly, heat them over medium-low heat until they reach 175° F, monitoring the temperature with a probe thermometer or a whisk with an integrated thermometer. The yolks will do their job; if you stir conscientiously, there will be very little cooked egg. You will be covered from a food-safety point of view — the USDA recommends cooking raw egg yolks to 160° for at least 24 seconds, which you will definitely do.
Step 2: Remove the custard mixture — that’s what you’ve done; you’ve made a custard — from heat, and pour it through a fine-meshed strainer. With any luck you’ll only have a few little yellow globs left in the strainer and a little bit around the bottom edges of the pan. Don’t worry about them; the Ice Cream Police will not come after you for this.
Step 3: Let the mixture cool down, then whisk in the sour cream. Chill the mixture in your refrigerator — or an ice bath, if you’re in a hurry — for a few hours. The cooler the mixture is, the faster it will turn into ice cream in your machine.
Step 4: Once the mixture is cold, churn it in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Here’s what the ice cream maker is doing:
If you’ve ever accidentally melted ice cream and then put it back in the freezer, you’ve learned that ice cream is not the same as frozen cream. Frozen cream is rock-hard and more or less inedible. An ice cream churn stirs the mixture as it freezes, keeping it from setting up with large, interlocked ice crystals. It also mixes air into the mixture. The industry term for this is “over-run.” The more air that is trapped in the frozen matrix, the fluffier and easier to scoop the final ice cream will be. Have you ever bought a large tub of ultra-discount ice cream from the supermarket and noticed how light and silky it is? That’s because it’s about 50 percent air by volume. The ultra-premium stuff that you buy by the pint has less over-run and is denser and creamier. When you make ice cream at home you are aiming for that denser consistency.
(You may have watched a cooking competition on television and seen a contestant use an industrial ice cream maker only to have a judge tell them that it is “over-churned,” that the cream has been beaten into butter. That’s a danger with an industrial machine; you don’t really need to worry about that with a home model.)
How long you churn your ice cream depends on a variety of factors that you don’t need to worry about. Just churn it until it is done. This could be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Often, when it’s finished, it will freeze up enough to jam up your ice cream maker, which will whine and complain loudly enough to get your attention and call you over to it. In any case, you are not trying to freeze the ice cream to a scoopable consistency. It should be the same texture as a stiff soft-serve from a roadside ice cream place.
Step 5: While the mixture is churning, chop the Clif Bar into small chunks.
Step 6: When the ice cream is done churning, use a large spoon to layer it with Clif Bar chunks into a container that you will put in the freezer. I like to use one-pint plastic takeout containers or paper ice cream cups that I’ve bought on the internet. A one-quart Tupperware container will work just as well.
Step 7: Label the container and leave it in your freezer for several hours to harden up.
Step 8: About 10 minutes before serving, remove it from the freezer to soften up a little on the kitchen counter.
This is definitely not a flavor that you’re going to find at the supermarket. The sour cream makes this very creamy but adds a background sourness that makes it mouth-watering. The brown sugar and molasses are comforting. That would be satisfying on its own, but the addition of chewy chunks of Clif Bar gives it a contrast in texture that makes you pay attention to what you’re eating and actually think about the flavor and texture of the Clif Bar.
Could you use crumbled-up oatmeal cookies instead of the Clif Bar? Yes, but they would get soggy — which is great if you like that. The Clif Bar is high enough in fat and sugar that it won’t freeze completely solid, doesn’t dissolve into the ice cream, and stays chewy, with little crisp bits that you don’t normally notice.
What’s With the Metric Measurements? Measuring ingredients by weight instead of by volume is a good habit to get into when you are baking or doing some other food preparation that requires precision. Flour, for instance, can vary in weight a great deal depending on whether you use a measuring cup to scoop it out of the bag, or sift it and spoon it carefully into a recipe. When you’re making ice cream and you need to keep track of the ratios of your ingredients, measuring remains important. How finely you chop an ingredient will affect its volume, for instance. If you decide to weigh your ingredients, metric measurements make a lot of sense. Because grams are much smaller units than ounces or pounds, it is easier to get a precise measurement of how much milk or mango puree or Tabasco you are adding to a recipe. Most kitchen scales toggle easily between metric and imperial measurements. Note: For home cooks, milliliters and grams are more or less the same for liquids. If you were a pharmacist, the difference in weight might be significant; the rest of us can use them interchangeably. King Arthur Flour’s website has an excellent conversion chart that is useful for these sorts of measurements at kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-chart.
How to Make Ice Cream Without a Machine
“This is all great,” I hear you say, “but what if I don’t have an ice cream machine? Am I supposed to buy one and try it out, just to find out if I even like making ice cream?”
Actually no. There is a work-around.
For any recipe for ice cream or sorbet, make the mixture, pretending that you have a machine to put it into. Act innocent. Maybe look at the ceiling and whistle a little. This is to fool the ice cream mixture into a false sense of security.
At the last minute, pull a large plastic freezer bag out from behind your back, and pour the mixture into it. “Sorry, pal,” you might say to the ice cream base, “but we’ve had to make some cutbacks.”
Before it has a chance to complain, seal the plastic bag, squeezing as much air out of it as possible, and put it in your freezer to freeze solid. If you aren’t entirely confident about the seal, you might want to put the bag in a cake pan or something, to make sure it doesn’t leak all over your broccoli.
“Hey, wait a second!” I hear you saying, “I thought we weren’t supposed to freeze it solid. I believe the term you used was ‘rock-hard and more or less inedible.’”
Thank you for paying attention. That would be true if you were planning on gnawing on frozen chunks of cream, but that’s not what you’re going to do.
After a couple of hours, remove the rock-hard frozen slab of cream and peel it out of its bag. Put it on a large cutting board and, using a large knife or a cleaver, cut it into medium-sized chunks, about the size of a hamster or a deck of cards.
Blend the frozen ice cream chunks in your blender, starting on its lowest speed, eventually moving it up to medium speed. If you have a high-end, ultra-powerful blender — the kind that they grind up hockey pucks with on the internet — this will go very smoothly. Your blender will feel totally validated and chuckle smugly. Even if you have a cheap, iffy blender that you picked up at a yard sale, it will take a deep breath, and say, “I got this, Boss.”
After a minute or so the frozen ice cream base will take on a stiff soft-serve consistency, at which point you treat it just as if you’d used a machine.
Here are two batches of Brown Sugar Sour Cream ice cream, one made in a blender and the other using a traditional ice cream maker. They taste identical. There is a small difference in texture: The batch on the left, the one made in the blender, is a little creamier, presumably because the blender beat slightly more over-run (air) into the mixture. It is a subtle difference, though, and if you didn’t taste them side by side you probably wouldn’t notice it. As you can tell, they both scoop well.
The Difference Between Ice Cream and Sorbet Ice cream enthusiasts tend to get hung up on the technical differences between different types of frozen desserts. There are times when the differences are important, but for most of us, most of the time, it is just a matter of word choice. Most of the differences in terms come from the type and amount of dairy that is used. Ice Cream – Almost all the liquid in the recipe is high-fat dairy: whole milk, half & half, or heavy cream. Gelato – This still uses dairy, but mostly whole milk, and no cream. This leads to a denser, more intense ice cream experience. Sherbet – Most of the liquid is water or fruit-juice based, with just a little dairy to make it creamy. Sorbet – There is no dairy at all. It might be zesty and fruity, a lot like a popsicle who knows someone, or it might use coconut milk or a dairy substitute to replace the cream and milkfat. It might be almost indistinguishable from a traditional ice cream.
Passion Fruit Sorbet
Passion Fruit Sorbet. Photo by John Fladd.
1-quart carton Goya Passionfruit Cocktail – look in the bottled juice aisle at your supermarket
1/3 cup (66 grams) sugar
zest and juice of two limes
Step 1: Shake the carton of passion fruit cocktail thoroughly, then add all three ingredients to a blender. Blend for 30 seconds or so.
Step 2: Chill for several hours.
Step 3: Blend again, then churn according to your ice cream maker’s manufacturer’s instructions.
Step 4: Transfer to one or more freezing containers, label, and harden in your freezer.
This is a full-blown sorbet, without a hint of dairy. It’s not creamy, but it is scoopable and looks beautiful when you serve it.
Warning: This particular sorbet lends itself to ice cream headaches. I’m not sure why, but self-restraint is your friend here. You might want to pace yourself.
Passion fruit is one of those flavors that you don’t think you’ve ever tasted before, but when you finally do taste it, it will seem really familiar. Actual passion fruits are pretty expensive in the supermarket — about $5 each in our area — but the juice is used in a lot of “tropical” juice mixes, the same as guavas. It is sour and perfumy, utterly delicious. Again, the sourness gives it a mouth-watering quality. It goes very well with lime. This is refreshing. Children tend to really like it.
Could you use the blender method to make this, then add eight ounces of dark rum to the mixture and call it a day and drink it?
Yes. Yes, you absolutely could.
But you would probably lose that day. Again, self-restraint is your friend.
Chocolate-Mango Swirl, a Secret Sorbet
Chocolate-Mango Swirl. Photo by John Fladd.
So, you know how you’ll be watching a cooking show, or even a cooking segment on a morning news show, and someone will make a big point of cooking “healthy” and after making some yes-I-suppose-I-could-eat-it-if-I-was-forced-to, non-fat, cholesterol-free, Very Sad dish, they will take a bite of it, force a smile and tell you that it is “just as satisfying as the real thing”?
You know — and they know, and they know that you know that they know — that whatever they just made is probably fine for what it is, but it is in no way as satisfying as what you actually want.
This isn’t that.
David Lebovitz’s chocolate sorbet is richer and more chocolatey than any actual ice cream could ever be. In fact, because just about its only ingredients are different forms of dark chocolate, dairy could only bring it down. It might be the most pure, intensely decadent form of chocolate you might ever have.
And yet—
Contrast can help bring even the best flavors into focus. Fruit might help here. Orange and raspberry are classic fruits to pair with chocolate, but what about something a little unexpected?
The Chocolate Half of the Sorbet
1½ cups (375 ml) water
1 cup (200 grams) white sugar
¾ cup (75 grams) unsweetened cocoa powder – Dutch process, if you have it (see below)
pinch of salt
6 ounces (170 grams) semisweet chocolate chips (For a completely vegan recipe, read the ingredients on the back of the package carefully. Many semisweet chocolates have trace amounts of milk in them. It is totally OK to substitute dark chocolate.)
¾ cup (180 ml) water
1 to 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Step 1: Combine 1½ cups of water, the sugar, and the cocoa powder in a small saucepan. Ordinary, plain, run-of-the-mill cocoa powder — which is not the same as hot chocolate mix — is a little acidic. It doesn’t feel completely silky in your mouth. It might even irritate the roof of your mouth a little — something I call the Captain Crunch Effect. In baking recipes, that acidity is balanced by other ingredients, such as baking soda, or egg whites, which are slightly alkaline, but here, you might want to use Dutch Process cocoa, which has already been adjusted to have a neutral pH.
In either case, dry cocoa is what chefs like to call hydrophobic, which under other circumstances can refer to rabies, but in cooking means that it doesn’t like to mix with water; it will float stubbornly on the top of the pot, unless you force it into solution by whisking it vigorously.
Do that.
Step 2: Cook the mixture over medium heat, whisking fairly often – once a minute or so – until it comes to a boil. Whisk it energetically for a minute or so, then remove it from heat. This short boiling will allow the starch in the cocoa powder to form a matrix that will thicken the mixture.
Step 3: Stir in the chocolate chips until they have melted completely, then whisk in the water.
Step 4: Add the vanilla, then whisk the mixture one more time, this time for about a minute. You are whipping in some extra air (over-run). The cocoa-thickened liquid will hold the air in suspension pretty well.
Step 5: The reason many recipes ask you to add vanilla last is that many of the flavor-carrying chemicals in vanilla are volatile and evaporate easily. You want to bring the temperature down — the water did this for you, in this case — before you add the vanilla to keep as much of its flavor intact as possible.
Step 6: Chill the mixture for several hours or overnight before churning it.
The Mango Half of the Sorbet
12.5 ounces (350 grams) frozen chopped mango. This is available with other frozen fruit in your supermarket and is cheaper and easier than using fresh mangoes for this recipe. Because you will be pureeing it, preserving the texture of fresh mango isn’t an issue here.
¾ cup (155 grams) canned coconut cream. This is not the pre-sweetened stuff with the parrot on the label that you used in your youth for dorm-room piña coladas; it is coconut milk with a higher than usual fat content (at least 20 percent), about the same as light cream.
¾ cup (150 grams) vegan half & half. This is usually made from a combination of coconut and almond milks, with a slightly lower fat content.
¾ cup (150 grams) white sugar
pinch of salt
Step 1: Combine all ingredients in a blender. Make sure you shake or stir the coconut cream before measuring it.
Step 2: Blend until thoroughly combined. Toward the end, turn up the speed on your blender to add air to the mixture.
Step 3: Chill, as above.
Combining the Two Sorbets
If your ice cream machine has two canisters, start freezing the chocolate sorbet first; with my machine, I start churning it half an hour before starting the mango.
If your machine only has one canister, or if you are using the “Freeze, Chop, Blend” method, make each of these sorbets separately.
When it’s time to mix them, alternate scoops or large spoonfuls of each in your freezing container. If you are scooping finished sorbets, make sure to mash them together. You aren’t trying to blend them with each other, but to bond the two types of sorbet, so you will get multi-colored scoops when you serve the finished product.
Freeze for a couple of hours before serving.
This is a real show-stopper. The decadence of the chocolate is perfectly set off by the perfumy fruitiness of the mango. It is easy to imagine a scenario where a vengeful monster is about to destroy a city — it looms overhead, crackly with eldritch power, cackling in triumph — when a small child totters forth and offers it a bowl of this sorbet. The creature tastes it, and its evil heart melts, or grows three sizes or something. It kisses the child on the head and heads back to sea, or wherever it came from.
It’s that good.
Even More Decadent – Fooling Around with Alcohol
Alcohol is a tricky addition to ice cream.
Because ice cream is so cold, it turns down the flavor of whatever base you use to make it. Your taste buds are numbed, and the volatile flavor compounds we talked about earlier are less enthusiastic about floating around your palate. If you want a particular flavor to shine through in the finished ice cream, you have to add a fairly aggressive amount of it to the recipe.
This presents a bit of a problem when it comes to alcohol. Because it freezes (or melts in this case) at a very low temperature — about 150 degrees below zero — adding too much of it to a recipe will keep an ice cream from freezing properly. If you don’t add enough of it, you won’t be able to taste it in the finished ice cream.
So what we’re looking for is an alcohol with a strong, boozy flavor, but as low a proof (percentage of alcohol) as possible. Bourbon is a good choice for this. There aren’t many low-proof bourbons out there — they bottom out at about 80 proof (40 percent alcohol), but bourbon carries such a distinctive flavor that a little can go a long way. Because it has its own sweetness, and the barrel-aging process gives it some vanilla and caramel notes, bourbon matches well with sweet flavors, notably milk chocolate.
Bourbon-Milk Chocolate Ice Cream
Bourbon-Milk Chocolate Ice Cream. Photo by John Fladd.
8 ounces (230 grams) good milk chocolate – I like Cadbury Dairy Milk for this.
3 cups (750 ml) half & half
¾ cup (150 grams) white sugar
pinch of salt
4 egg yolks
3 Tablespoons (1½ ounces) 80-proof bourbon — Jack Daniel’s works well for this.
Step 1: Combine all the ingredients except the bourbon in a small saucepan. Whisk continually until the mixture reaches 175° F, or temper the egg yolks traditionally (see Brown Sugar Sour Cream Ice Cream, above), then remove from heat.
Step 2: Let the mixture cool thoroughly, then stir in the bourbon.
Step 3: Chill the mixture as much as you can, probably overnight in the coldest part of your refrigerator, then churn according to your machine’s manufacturer’s instructions.
This recipe pushes the alcohol content to its absolute limit. It will not want to freeze; you will have to force the issue. Let it churn for as long as your machine will put up with it (a full hour in my case), then very quickly transfer it to your freezing container and get it into the freezer immediately. Leave it for several hours, perhaps even 24.
What you will end up with is a very rich, milk-chocolatey ice cream with a boozy backbone. It’s very, very good, but it’s very soft. Even at its coldest it will have a pudding consistency, and it will dissolve into a puddle if you look at it too intensely. It is to be served and eaten immediately. Serve all the other ice creams to your dinner party guests before you break this one out. Do not wait until someone has blown out the candles.
Eat it immediately.
Or, hypothetically, you could serve the dish in an ice bath.
A Grownup Ice Cream – Fresh Mint
We all know what to expect from something mint-flavored. It will probably be a lovely green color. It might be shockingly minty, like a peppermint patty, or sweet and a little spicy, like a candy cane.
What we don’t usually expect is for it to taste herbal, which is odd when you think about it, because that’s what mint is — an herb.
This is a mint ice cream for a grownup, for someone who has just made two pool runs and gone to soccer practice and done a load of laundry and gotten eye-rolled for their trouble. This is a find-a-spot-in-the-shade-and-take-five-minutes-to-yourself-while-listening-to-Air-Supply adult ice cream with no M&Ms or cookie dough. It is. Mint. Ice. Cream.
Fresh Mint Ice Cream
On the left is the plain Fresh Mint; the one on the right has chocolate wafers. Photo by John Fladd.
¾ cup (150 grams) sugar
3 cups (750 ml) half & half
pinch of salt
A large bunch of fresh mint – a double handful. At least 100 grams. Perhaps two packed cups. It doesn’t need to be picked or chopped. The stems and leaves are both fine for this, but you probably want to rinse it off. More is better.
Step 1: Heat the cream, sugar and salt in a medium saucepan until just before it boils, 175° to 190° F, stirring occasionally.
Step 2: Remove from heat.
Step 3: Add the mint to the hot cream mixture. Squash it down into the cream with a wooden spoon, until it wilts a little and is almost completely submerged. Cover the pot with a lid or a plate and let the mint steep for one hour, squashing it with your wooden spoon from time to time.
Step 4: Strain through a fine-meshed strainer, chill, and churn, either in your machine or using the “Freeze, Chop, Blend” method, and transfer to a freezing container.
Depending on how much mint you use, this will probably not be an intense Altoid-y ice cream. It will be an ice cream that tastes like actual mint. It has a slightly icy texture, which in this case is an asset; it adds to the refreshment.
Could you smooth it out to make it creamier? Yes, by replacing half of the cream with heavy cream, but try it this way your first time.
Could you add in something to make it a little more family-friendly? You know the plain chocolate wafers your mother used to make icebox cake? You could crumble some of those in layers when you move the ice cream to a container. It will taste like a more sophisticated Girl Scout cookie.
But, you know, ice cream.
Impressing People at a Dinner Party – Lemon Ricotta, Blueberry Swirl Ice Cream
Chocolate has better PR, but if pressed, a surprising number of people will tell you that lemon is their favorite sweet flavor; it’s tangy and floral and its slight sourness has a mouth-watering quality that is a little bit sparkly and magical.
But lemon ice cream has a problem. Lemon sherbet? Totally doable. Lemon sorbet? Piece of cake. But ice cream?
The problem is chemical. Lemon juice is very acidic. On a pH scale of 0 to 7, it has a score of 2. When the proteins in dairy are exposed to acid, you get something delightful, but not necessarily what we’re looking for here — cheese. Getting a finished product that is both lemony and creamy runs the risk of cheesiness. We can lower the cheese factor by not heating this ice cream base, starting with cold ingredients, and by churning it immediately, without leaving it to chill in the refrigerator, but we will still end up with a slightly chewy texture, which leaves us with a couple of options:
We could turn this into a sorbet, by replacing the dairy with coconut cream and almond milk, which would change the flavor slightly.
Or we could really lean into the cheesiness. Lemon has a well-known affinity for ricotta, the cheese you use in lasagna. (Ricotta with a little lemon syrup makes for a really good breakfast, by the way.) Why not go in that direction?
And add blueberries. Blueberries get along really well with lemon and ricotta. Think blueberry cheesecake.
Lemon Ricotta, Blueberry Ripple Ice Cream
Lemon Ricotta, Blueberry Swirl Ice Cream. Photo by John Fladd.
zest of 3 lemons
½ cup (100 grams) white sugar
½ cup (125 ml) fresh squeezed lemon juice, chilled
1 cup (250 ml) half & half, chilled
1 cup (250 grams) full-fat ricotta, chilled
pinch of salt
A jar of blueberry preserves — store-bought is perfectly fine. The sugar and pectin will keep the preserves from freezing solid.
Step 1: Combine everything but the blueberry preserves in a blender, and blend thoroughly.
Step 2: Churn immediately. If you are using the “Freeze, Chop, Blend” method, freeze the mixture quickly as possible, in the coldest part of your freezer. If you have a stand-alone or chest freezer, this is the moment it has been waiting for its whole life.
Step 3: When you transfer the frozen lemon ice cream to its freezing container, layer it with large spoonfuls of blueberry preserves.
This is a delicious — dare I say it? — fancy ice cream. It will have a dense, slightly chewy consistency, but also an unusually pronounced dairy flavor. Often the dairy in ice cream is used largely as a flavor delivery device; in this case it is the flavor. I won’t say that it is an adult ice cream — children like it very much, thank you — but it is a sophisticated one.
Finally, a Cautionary Tale About Making Promises, and Involving Ice Cream Cake
But first, a short story:
Susan knew she was in trouble.
She had promised her daughter Lulu that she would be back from her business trip in time for Lulu’s Orange Belt Test in Taekwondo. She would be gone all week, but she would for certain be back by 6 p.m. on Friday.
Lulu had given her a hard look, then thrust her little finger out at Susan.
“Pinky-swear!” she demanded.
In spite of a slight fluttering in her stomach, Susan pinky-swore. She knew she would make it home in time; her last meeting was supposed to wrap up at 10:30 on Friday. She would have her carry-on bag with her at the meeting and she’d go directly to the airport. What could possibly keep her in Toledo?
A baggage-handlers’ strike, as it turned out, combined with high winds and hail. It was 2 a.m. on Saturday before she staggered through the door at home. She knew she’d be exhausted when Lulu woke her up at 6.
As it turned out, that wasn’t a problem. When she finally got up around 11 and went into the kitchen for some coffee, Lulu got up and walked away into the living room.
As often as she wished for a little peace and quiet, Susan quickly learned that the hostile silence of a 6-year-old grew increasingly soul-crushing as the day went on. She didn’t get any sympathy from her wife, either.
“Hey, you promised me, too. This is a You Problem.”
After a few hours, though, even Carmen started to feel a chill in the air and she took Lulu to spend the afternoon at her mother’s house, giving Susan a few hours to come up with a plan to salvage the tattered remains of her family’s love.
Which, somehow, is how she ended up at the dollar store. Not that she had any actual hope of finding a miracle there, but the dollar store is where Susan went when she needed to be inspired, creatively.
She found her answer in a display by the door, even before she went inside. Ten dollars and five minutes later, she had what she needed.
Susan wasn’t much of a baker, but she did have a strawberry cake mix in the cupboard at home, and half a gallon of strawberry ice cream in the freezer, so it seemed like a no-brainer to use a sandcastle mold from the dollar store to make a Pink Princess Ice Cream Cake.
It turned out to be a little harder than she anticipated.
It can’t be denied that this was a disappointing setback, but Susan’s father had always said that God hates a coward, so she refused to give up.
She still had a couple of hours to work with, so, stopping only to give the Gloppy Castle Cake to the heavy metal band who practiced in the garage next door — who subsequently declared her to be the Awesomest Chick Ever and asked her if she wanted to join the band (an idea she decided to put a pin in until she saw how the rest of the afternoon panned out) — Susan made another run to the dollar store and the supermarket, and tried again.
This time she used a more traditional sand bucket with sloped sides, which worked pretty well. By the time she added pink balloons, pink ribbons, a pink tablecloth and pink utensils, she had a credible Pink Bribe to offer Lulu when she got home, who decided to forgive her, even though she had decided that she didn’t like pink anymore and really wanted zebra stripes.
Carmen agreed that Susan had more or less redeemed herself, but wondered why she had used a children’s sand bucket as an ice cream mold, instead of a spring-form pan.
“A what, now?” Susan asked.
“A spring-form pan. You know, the pan with the ski-boot buckle on the side that I use for making cheesecake?’
“That’s just for cheesecake, though, isn’t it?”
…
“I’m not really very bright, am I?”
“That seems to be the theme of the weekend. Let’s make some strawberry margaritas.”
Triple Strawberry Ice Cream Cake
Triple Strawberry Ice Cream Cake. Photo by John Fladd.
1 half-gallon carton of strawberry ice cream
1 box of strawberry cake mix, and the ingredients to make it
1 large jar of strawberry preserves
Step 1: Line the bottom of a large spring-form pan with parchment paper, then bake a strawberry cake in it, according to the directions on the box. Allow it to cool.
Step 2: Remove the cake from the pan, and chill the pan in your freezer. Meanwhile, use a bread knife to slice the cake in half across the middle, so you have two thinner cakes, not two semi-circular ones.
Step 3: Remove the strawberry ice cream from the freezer to soften slightly.
Step 4: Reline the bottom of your spring-form pan with more parchment paper.
Step 5: Scoop half the ice cream into the bottom of your pan, and smash it down with a spoon to completely fill the bottom section.
Step 6: Add a layer of cake. Because you baked it in this pan, it should fit perfectly. If you didn’t think things through, and used a child’s sand bucket, you will have to do some measuring.
Step 7: Use a large spoon to spread strawberry preserves across the cake. How much you use is up to you.
Step 8: Spread more preserves on the other half-cake.
Step 9: By this time the rest of your ice cream should have softened enough to add it to the cake in the pan without having to squash it too much. Do that, then flip the remaining half-cake, jam-side down into the pan, on top of the ice cream.
Step 10: Cover the final cake layer with plastic wrap, then put everything in the freezer to firm up.
Strawberry Margarita 2 to 3 frozen strawberries – approx. 50 gram, or 2 ounces 1½ teaspoons white sugar 2 ounces blanco tequila – I like Hornito’s for margaritas 1 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
Step 1: Thoroughly muddle the strawberries and sugar in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. I use a large pestle from a mortar and pestle; the handle of a hammer would work well for this. Step 2: Add the tequila, then dry-shake the mixture. This means without ice. The tequila will do a good job of bonding with the fruity compounds in the strawberries. Step 3: Add lime juice and ice, then shake again, until very cold. Step 4: Strain into a cocktail glass, and drink while it is still blisteringly cold. Unlike traditional Mexican Restaurant Strawberry Margaritas, this tastes strongly of actual strawberries and lime. It is best very cold, but not frozen. Haven’t you had enough frozen treats, already?
You know how you can be in a large crowd, almost overwhelmed by the dozens of conversations going on around you, but if someone 30 feet away says your name, it grabs your attention immediately? I have the same reaction if someone is discussing pizza or tells a knock-knock joke.
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
From.
From who?
From “WHOM”! Jeesh, I can’t take you anywhere.
Have you ever wondered why that never happens when you’re watching a crowd scene in a movie? It’s because the background extras have been instructed to say a particular word to each other, over and over — one that is unlikely to grab anyone’s attention. If they just said, “blah, blah,” it wouldn’t sound right, but if they said actual sentences, it would run the risk of distracting from the lead actors’ lines.
The industry term for this is rhubarbing, because the mantra-like word they are instructed to say is often “rhubarb.”
So now you know that.
Strawberry rhubarb collins
2 ounces vodka – I’ve been using Tito’s lately, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it.
2 frozen strawberries (about 1 ounce)
½ ounce orange curaçao
¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
¾ ounce rhubarb syrup (see below)
4 to 5 ounces tonic water
Blend the frozen strawberries and vodka thoroughly. If you have a miniature blender for making smoothies, this is an ideal use for it. Otherwise, mash the berries up with the vodka in the bottom of a glass with a pestle or a wooden spoon.
Strain the berry vodka through a fine-meshed strainer, into the bottom of an ice-filled Collins glass. Add the curaçao, lemon juice, and rhubarb syrup. Stir thoroughly.
Top with tonic water, then stir again. Add a straw, and drink somewhere relaxing.
Obviously, strawberries and rhubarb are a natural combination; the sweetness of the berries plays off the tartness of the rhubarb. Once in a while you will find a strawberry pie in the wild, or possibly a rhubarb pie, but strawberry-rhubarb is a reliable standby. They work well in this drink but get a little more backbone from the citrusy curaçao. The lemon juice keeps everything from getting too sweet, and the slight bitterness of the tonic levels everything out while bringing fizziness to the table.
Early summer brings a lot of rites of passage — weddings, graduations, anniversaries. This is a good drink to sit and think. Not to brood — this isn’t Irish whiskey — but to take a minute and think about where your life is headed. It is an optimistic drink.
Rhubarb syrup
Clean several stalks of rhubarb, then chop it into smallish pieces, about 1-inch dice.
Freeze the chopped rhubarb for several hours, maybe overnight. This will allow large ice crystals to perforate all the cells and allow a lot of weeping (on the part of the rhubarb, hopefully not yours) when you cook it.
Combine the frozen rhubarb and an equal amount of sugar (by weight) in a small saucepan.
Cook over medium heat. As the rhubarb melts, the sugar will draw out its juice. You will be surprised at how much juice there is. About halfway through the cooking process you might want to help the process along with a potato masher or the bottom of a beer bottle.
When the rhubarb juice comes to a boil, stir it for a few seconds to make sure all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat, and squeeze a small amount of lemon juice into it. Let it cool, then strain it and store the syrup in a bottle. It will keep for a month or more in your refrigerator.
Save the rhubarb pulp. It looks like it has come out on the losing end of a fight, but it is actually a super-delicious compote that is excellent on toast or ice cream.
On a good day, a cucumber is 96 percent water. That hydrocentic (a word I just made up and am very pleased with) nature of a cucumber lends itself really well to cocktails. If you can extract the water? It’s bonded with cucumber flavor. That makes for a very good syrup. If you chop a cucumber up and soak it in alcohol, the volatile enzymes that give the cucumber its flavor are happy to jump ship and bond with the alcohol instead of the water. The more finely you chop it, the more surface area you provide for this reaction to play out. Let’s do this.
Cucumber syrup
(Trust me; it’s delicious.) Wash an English cucumber — one of the long, plastic-wrapped, ridgey ones — and chop it into medium (1/2-inch) dice. You don’t have to peel it or even remove the stem.
Put the cucumber pieces into a bowl, and put the bowl in your freezer. You can use any kind of container you like, but an open-top bowl will make your freezer smell like cucumbers. Which is nice.
Inside the cells of the cucumber, ice crystals will start to form. It will probably take an hour or two for the cucumber chunks to freeze up completely.
Using a kitchen scale, weigh the cucumber pieces in a small saucepan, and add an equal amount of sugar by weight. If you don’t have a kitchen scale, a typical English cucumber will probably give you around three cups of diced up chunks. This will probably weigh around the same as 1¾ cups of white sugar.
Cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally. The first time you do this, you will be shocked at how much liquid comes out of the cucumbers. (It’s around 96 percent water, remember?)
At some point, crush the soggy cucumber pieces with a potato masher to coax even more liquid out.
Bring the mixture to a boil. Stir it for a few seconds, to make sure that all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat and let it sit for half an hour or so, then, using a fine-meshed strainer and a funnel, pour it into an empty bottle. In my experience, it will last about a month in your refrigerator. You will probably end up with about two cups of syrup.
Cucumber gin
(This is even more straightforward.) Wash, but don’t peel, some cucumbers.
Put the cucumbers and an equal amount of gin, by weight (see above) in your blender. Because your goal is to overwhelm the gin with cucumber flavor, you can get away with using a fairly non-fancy gin (I like Gordon’s). Blend at the lowest speed for about a minute. The goal here is to chop the cucumbers up pretty finely, to give them more surface area exposed to the alcohol. You’re not actually trying to puree it or anything.
At this point, you will have a bright green mixture that looks like hot dog relish. Pour it into a wide-mouthed jar, label it, and store it somewhere cool and dark for seven days, shaking it two or three times per day.
Strain and bottle it. If you let it set for another day or so, some of the tiny cucumber particles will sink to the bottom of the bottle, and you can strain it again with a coffee filter to make it prettier. Either way, it will be delicious.
Cucumber fizz
(Finally!)
2 ounces cucumber gin (see above)
½ ounces cucumber syrup (see above)
3 to 5 mint leaves
5 ounces plain seltzer
lemon wedge for garnish
Muddle the mint at the bottom of a tall glass. Add ice.
Add the syrup, the gin, and then the seltzer. Squeeze the lemon wedge, then drop it into the pool. Stir.
Cucumber and mint are a classic combination. Gin loves being carbonated. The lemon gives a hint of acid that keeps the cucumber from tasting flat. This is light and fizzy and reminds you that, against all expectations, a cucumber is a fruit. It is the cocktail friend you never knew you wanted to be friends with.
I like to think that it is happy to make the sacrifice for you.
Featured photo: Cucumber Fizz. Photo by John Fladd.
I know I’m not the first person to point this out, but the original versions of a lot of nursery rhymes and fairytales were pretty brutal. In the original version of Little Red Riding Hood, the story ends with the wolf eating her. Ring Around the Rosie is about the Black Death. In The Old Woman Who Lived in Her Shoe, the shoe is less an actual shoe and more a family-planning metaphor. An old version of Snow White was known in Switzerland as The Death of Seven Dwarfs.
Few of them though, are as hard-core as Rapunzel:
“The prince was overcome with grief, and in his despair, he threw himself from the tower. He escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell poked out his eyes. Blind, he wandered about in the forest, eating nothing but grass and roots, and doing nothing but weeping and wailing over the loss of his beloved wife. Thus, he wandered about miserably for some years, finally happening into the wilderness where Rapunzel lived miserably with the twins that she had given to.” — Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Rapunzel
Never mind Rapunzel’s mother selling her into captivity to a witch in exchange for a head of lettuce at the beginning of the story. These four sentences alone would make an eight-episode Netflix series. Also, wife? Twins?
“That’s both fascinating, and disturbing,” you say, “but how does it relate to cocktails?” I’m glad you asked.
In my relative youth, a combination of poor decision-making skills and the callous forces of Capitalism left me living in a forest cottage for a summer, with literally no money, existing largely on birdseed and the berries that I could forage in a nearby clearing. I can attest to the flesh-slashing properties of blackberry thorns.
I call today’s cocktail“Too Many Thorns.” The prince from Rapunzel would agree with me.
Too many thorns
2 ounces gin – this week, I’m using Engine Organic Gin, which comes in an oil can, because why not?
½ ounce blackberry syrup (see below)
1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
½ ounce blackberry brandy
1 egg white
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker, and dry-shake it (without ice) for 30 seconds. It is important to do this, because if you add an egg white directly to ice it will seize up in an extremely unappetizing way.
Add ice, and shake for another 30 seconds.
Strain into a cocktail or coupé glass. Your drink should have a foamy head on it.
Raise a toast to our unnamed, bethorned prince wandering blindly through the wilderness, eating grass and roots, and eat some pâté on a cracker.
So, what’s with the egg white?
Two things: First, it adds a foamy, velvety quality to a cocktail. Additionally, egg whites are slightly alkaline, which levels out the acidity from the lemon juice and blackberries. Lemon is a classic combination with blackberries, and the bite from the gin cuts through the sweetness of the drink and reminds you that there is an adult in the room. Hopefully you.
Though it’s usually grown-ups who climb towers and get their eyes gouged.
Blackberry syrup
Combine one bag of frozen blackberries with an equal amount (by weight) of sugar in a small saucepan. Cook on medium heat. As the berries thaw, the sugar will draw the juice out from them. Because they’ve been frozen, all the cells in the berries have been stabbed by ice crystals and are more than willing to cry about it. Cook slowly, until the mixture comes to a boil. Somewhere in this process, mash everything with a potato masher. Let the mixture boil for 10 to 15 seconds, to make sure that all the sugar has dissolved.
Remove from the heat, then strain it to remove seeds and berry guck. This will keep for several weeks in your refrigerator.
Featured photo: Blackberry without the thorns. Photo by John Fladd.
In my youth, in the late 18th century, I watched a television show about stunt performers. One of the things that stuck with me was a stunt man getting ready to be thrown off a roof, and after going over all his safety protocols, the last thing he did before the fall was to make sure he had his “buddy” with him — in this case, a tiny, dog’s squeaky toy. Apparently, many stunt people have a superstition about carrying a small toy with them during a stunt, so they have a friend with them and don’t have to go through something harrowing alone.
Most driving is somewhat harrowing for me, so for many years I’ve carried a “buddy” with me. In my case he is a 2-inch-high figurine of a musketeer, holding a sword in his right hand and a dagger in his left. Having him with me has always made me feel slightly cooler. I like to imagine myself raising an eyebrow, twirling my mustache with one hand and nonchalantly placing my other on the hilt of my sword. In my daydream, an alley full of street toughs — or, more likely, a clerk at the DMV — would scuttle away, completely intimidated.
Apparently I’m not the only one to feel that way. For three cars and several mechanics, I’ve dropped my car off to be serviced, only to find my musketeer on the dashboard waiting for me, obviously placed there when the mechanic was done playing with him.
Last week, my teenager asked me to drive them to school. It was the morning of the AP Literature Exam, and the apprehension was palpable. When I pulled into the parking lot of the school, we just sat in silence for a moment or two. Eventually, lacking any practical advice, I pulled my musketeer from his spot under my dashboard and held him out.
“Would you like to take The Musketeer with you?”
A moment’s silence.
“Yes, please.”
I’ve been facing down a few challenges lately, and I for one, could stand a little more insouciance in my life, right now.
The Musketeer
This is a riff on a cocktail called The Aramis, after one of the title characters in The Three Musketeers. Apparently there already is a drink called The Three Musketeers, but it is a sweet, ice creamy, after-dinner affair named after the candy bar. That’s not really what I’m going for here, so I’ve adapted something a bit more specific.
2 ounces very cold gin — I put mine in the freezer for several hours
1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
¼ ounce simple syrup
½ ounce blue Curaçao
Combine the gin, lime juice and simple syrup over ice, in a cocktail shaker. Shake until the shaker starts to frost over.
Pour into a cocktail glass.
Using a spoon, touching the inside of the glass, slowly pour the blue Curaçao down the side of the glass. Because it is denser than the rest of the cocktail, it should sink to a puddle in the bottom.
Ask your digital assistant to play the William Tell Overture at volume 9. Sip your drink like a boss.
In theory, blue Curaçao is orange-flavored. The reality is that it just tastes blue. The gin and lime juice are pretty bracing, but the hint of syrup and the Curaçao round it out. It will help you feel like a musketeer named after a Greek philosopher.
Featured photo: The Musketeer. Photo by John Fladd.
