Unusual Ice Cream Flavors

My friend Stephanie is the queen of homemade ice cream. She has one of those great little Cuisinart ice cream makers with the canister that goes in the freezer, which makes about a quart of ice cream in 20 minutes and does a very good job of it. It’s not hand-cranked ice cream, but I don’t have the slave labor of five very competitive kids that my parents did to make hand-cranked ice cream. “Hey! Let’s see who can turn it the longest!” We always fell for that.

Anyway, Stephanie comes up with great, creative, and very tasty ice cream flavors. My favorite is one she calls Nuclear Winter, which is a Philadelphia style vanilla ice cream (which means some mixture of milk and cream, with sugar and flavorings and no eggs) with crushed Atomic Fireballs mixed in. I love Atomic Fireballs (are you reading this, Teri?) and surrounding them with ice cream just makes them that much better.

Which got me thinking about the combination of hot, sweet, and dairy. I knew I liked hot and dairy together – I love Mexican food, with peppers, cheese and sour cream. How could you miss by adding sweet into the mix? Thinking along those lines led me to chocolate, which, of course, came from Mexico in the first place, and is used as an ingredient in savory foods in Mexican cooking. So I thought what if you were to add peppers to chocolate ice cream. Seemed like a great idea to me.

So I went out to the internet and searched for a recipe that did that and I found one. This particular recipe has you make a bittersweet chocolate ganache by bringing half and half, in which you have placed a jalapeño pepper which has been stemmed, seeded and sliced, to a boil, then stirring in chopped bittersweet chocolate. You stir to melt the chocolate and mix it in well, let it cool, then refrigerate overnight. The next day, you strain out the pepper. In a separate bowl, you beat eggs and sugar until they’re light and fluffy, then mix in the chocolate mixture, cream and pecans. Then you freeze it into ice cream.

It was a huge disappointment. The jalapeño imparted no heat whatsoever and only a mild vegetal flavor, which was mostly covered by the chocolate. The chocolate fell out of the suspension and turned gritty in the ice cream. It was kind of a disaster.

But I still liked the idea in theory. So I did some research. There is a Good Eats episode in which Alton Brown makes chocolate ice cream. He addresses the chocolate issue by using cocoa instead of chocolate because it stays in suspension. I had thought of that myself and was glad to have his corroboration. For his chocolate ice cream, he also uses a custard base (one in which, as opposed to Philadelphia style ice cream, you do use eggs), but I really like the Philadelphia style, because it taste lighter and fresher to me, so I decided to use his Philadelphia style recipe for vanilla ice cream as my starting point. For the chocolate, I used the same amount of cocoa that he uses for his chocolate ice cream.

I then turned to the pepper. What would give me the most bang for the buck in terms of pepper flavor. With most herbs, when you want concentrated herbal flavor, you turn to the dried version. I have a recipe for Honey Lavender Ice Cream (more about it later), which calls for steeping dried lavendar flowers in hot cream and half and half for 20 minutes to extract the flavor. I decided to do the same thing with dried red pepper flakes. Being a serious fan of heat, I started with a teaspoon.

I also wanted some vanilla to round out the flavor. Vanilla is originally from Mexico and Central America, so it’s part of what was beginning to emerge as a unified theme of flavor for this ice cream. And I just happened to have a bottle of Mexican vanilla that someone had recently given me. If you’ve never used it before, real Mexican vanilla (there are a lot of imitation Mexican vanillas out there), has a very different, more robust flavor than vanilla made from Madagascar vanilla beans.

So I had an ice cream with Mexican vanilla, chocolate, and hot red peppers. What was I going to call it? Easy. Aztec Ice Cream. Here’s the recipe.

2 cups half-and-half
1 cup whipping cream
1 cup minus 2 tablespoons sugar
1.5 ounces (by weight) cocoa powder
1 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon Mexican vanilla extract

Combine all ingredients except the vanilla in a large saucepan and mix thoroughly. Place over medium heat and bring just to a simmer. Turn off the heat, cover and let sit for 30 minutes. Strain mixture into lidded container, stir in vanilla, and refrigerate overnight to mellow flavors and texture.

Freeze mixture in ice cream freezer according to unit’s instructions. Once the volume has increased by 1/2 to 3/4 times, and reached a soft serve consistency, spoon the mixture back into a lidded container and harden in the freezer before serving.

When you eat this ice cream, the first thing you taste is chocolate, with a nice creamy mouth feel from the dairy. (I used Homeland Creamery cream and half and half. It’s a regional dairy and their products are very creamy.) When the ice cream gets to the back of your mouth, the heat hits and it finishes with a wonderful back of the throat burn, which the cream helps to put out. It’s a little like a roller coaster ride in your mouth.

Now, about that Honey Lavender Ice Cream. The recipe is from Gourmet and it can be found on Epicurious.com, so I’m not going to post it here. It’s also a Philadelphia style ice cream. In this case, it’s sweetened with honey and flavored with dried lavender flowers. You mix cream, half and half, and honey in a pan, then pour in the lavender flowers, and bring the mixture to a boil. Turn the heat off and let it steep for 20 minutes. I can’t tell you how incredibly good it smells while it’s steeping. Then you strain the flowers out, put it in the refrigerator overnight to cool, freeze it, let it harden in the freezer, and serve. To my taste, the combination of honey and lavender makes it taste a little like cough syrup, but it’s a wonderful flavor and very unusual. It also taste incredibly summery because of the scent of lavender. (For people in Winston-Salem, I found dried lavender flowers at Fresh Market.)

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