Dark Chocolate Strawberry Ice Cream

6oz. Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate

1/3 cup Dutch cocoa powder

2 cups cream

1 cup milk

2 tsp vanilla

4 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

Melt the chocolate in a barely simmering double boiler:

Combine the egg yolks and sugar in a metal bowl. Whip them until smooth and light-yellow:

In a sauce pan, combine milk, cream, vanilla, and cocoa powder, bring to a boil and immediately remove form heat (watch it closely and keep a spoon or whisk handy to stir it to keep it from boiling over!)

Add a splash of the the hot cream/cocoa to the egg/sugar bowl while stirring the eggs. The rest of the hot cream/cocoa can be added to the eggs slowly with plenty of stirring to ensure that the eggs don't get scrambled! Once all the cream/cocoa is incorporated, add the melted chocolate and whisk it all together until it is evenly combined.

At this point I put the bowl in the freezer, but it could also be left in the fridge for several hours. The point is to cool this pre-ice-cream soup as much as possible without freezing it, yet. When I put it in the freezer, I keep an eye on it, stirring ever 5-15min to make sure it's not freezing and cooling evenly.

Once it feels cold to the touch, but is still liquid (a very thick liquid in this case!) it can be transferred to an ice cream maker! The bowl of the ice cream machine must be frozen at least 12 hours prior to making ice cream! I just keep my bowl in the freezer so it's ready to use whenever the mood strikes me. Also, make sure the paddle is in the bowl before your pour the ice-cream-soup in because the soup will freeze upon contact with the bowl making it almost impossible to insert the paddle afterwards!

(I totally recommend this CuisineArt Ice Cream Maker!)

After about half an hour, it will look like soft-serve ice cream. This means it's done!

This is also the time to add things like syrup, chocolate chips, cookie crumbles, or fruit. In this case, I used diced strawberries:

As soon as all the strawberries were in, I turned it off and then worked quickly to get the ice cream out of the machine, into a bowl, and into the freezer. Ice cream can be eaten immediately out of the ice cream maker, though it is very soft. I recommend freezing it further in the freezer. 

This ice cream turned out to have a super rich, bitter, dark-chocolate flavor punctuated with bits of frozen strawberry. If you're a fan of sweeter milk-chocolate, some extra sugar should be added to this recipe. The texture is interesting, almost more like a very cold mousse rather than ice cream. I'm suspicious this texture might come from whipping the eggs and sugar together. I usually just mix the eggs and sugar until they're evenly combined, but no whipped. I got the idea to whip them this time from a chocolate ice cream recipe I found elsewhere on the internet. Anyway, this ice cream is still totally delicious!

Whiskey Earl Grey Ice Cream

I just realized I can link to stuff in my blog posts!! Blogging just got a lot more exciting! What's also exciting is the ice cream I just made. It's something I made for my 22nd birthday party and for some unfortunate reason this is the first time I've recreated it since then. It's basically a combination of three of my favorite things: ice cream, vanilla earl grey tea, and Irish whiskey. The original recipe was made with Paris Tea, which is basically just earl grey flavored with vanilla. The tea is suspended within delicate sachets inside an ornate tin to satisfy all your upper-class British sensibilities. I decided to use some high quality Cascadian tea instead this time. Here's the recipe:

2 cups Twinbrook Cream

1 cup Twinbrook Whole Milk

3 Egg Yolks

2 tsp Vanilla

3/4 cup Sugar

couple fluid ounces of Jameson Irish Whiskey

about a Tbsp of Remedy Teas Earl Grey Creme

- Put the whiskey in a sauce pan and boil until syrupy, add the milk and cream to the pan.

- Bring the cream and milk to a boil, turn off the heat, add the tea, and cover with a lid. Let the tea steep for about 5 minutes.

- In a separate (non-plastic) bowl, whisk together the eggs yolks, vanilla, and sugar.

- Pour the hot cream mixture over the egg mixture (through a strainer to catch loose-leaf tea) being careful to temper the eggs. In this case, tempering can be accomplished by simply pouring the hot liquid slowly and stirring vigorously.

- Cool the liquid until it feels cold to the touch, but not frozen. I usually do this in the freezer and it takes about 15 minutes or so. You could also let it cool in the fridge overnight if you're patient.

- Pour the cold liquid into an ice cream machine with a pre-frozen bowl, turn the machine on, and walk away (ahh technology!)

- When the ice cream is "done" in the machine it's at the soft-serv phase. Scoop it into a plastic container and put it in the freezer for at least a couple hours to let it "hard" freeze.

Several years ago when I was in culinary school, my friend Josh got an ice cream maker and started making so much ice cream there was even talk of him and our friend, Chris, starting an ice cream company called Wopanajew! ...Wopanajew never happened, but a lot of good ice cream sure did, anyway, I still use the method Josh taught me all those years ago! Thanks, Josh!

Spring, It's about damn time

After two years, we're actually having a decent spring here that's starting to feel like summer. With changing weather comes changing tastes and I'm on an ice cream and IPA kick again. The regular Friday free beer tasting at Pike Street Beer & Wine was showcasing California's Firestone Brewery. They make a fine bitter beer indeed. Molly Moon's is still whipping up some incredible ice cream and they've added two more waffle-cone-irons to deal with the block-long lines. Alex got some ginger ice cream with candied ginger bits in it and I had a mix of salted chocolate ice cream and orange tamarind sorbet, all in a waffle cone, of course. So delicious! Molly Moon's is the most brilliantly delicious thing to happen to this city since Poppy opened, which I still need to go to.