The Joys of Research

 

Ice cream is gorgeous. It's the supermodel of frozen desserts. Sure, its career is fleeting, but it's just so damned photogenic when it's at the top of its game.

I didn't really appreciate this fact until I wrote America's Best Ice Cream Shops, which published today. I've always known ice cream tastes delicious, but just look at the photos in this gallery, and you'll see what I mean. Ice cream transcends the medium, offering the hint of a taste even in its two-dimensional form.

Thanks to Kathryn for the picture!

Nantucket Tasting Tour: Sconset Market

Sue then led us to the little general store up the street, where we got ice cream:


And ate it while strolling down the most charming seaside lane I've ever, ever stepped foot upon:

It seems like it would be utter misery to live there, because you'd always feel obligated to be doing something appropriately charming, and there's only so many hours a day you can tend flowers, whitewash a fence, or pour tea for guests out on the verandah.

This lane was so cute I don't even remember eating the ice cream. It's a total flavor blank. Charm-induced taste amnesia. Oh well.

Nantucket Tasting Tour: Boarding House

A muddled but delightful combination of the aforementioned passion fruit cocktail, a comfortable table in the dining room, another bottle of wine, and the total willingness of the group to order and share everything anyone was even slightly curious about led to my favorite kind of full: the one where you had a few deliberate bites of many things and gotten to talk your way through it with other people who are as giddy about the tastes as you are.

We had an interesting antipasti plate with a tomato-pomegranate spread, a chickpea and raisin terrine, and something with carrot that I do not perfectly remember. We also tried a pizzetta (pizza named after me) topped with black truffle cheese and mission fig, a pretty pasta, the well-named chicken under a brick, and a few more dishes that I no longer remember. (Until I was in my late 20s, I could be counted on to always remember everything that I ate in social atmospheres, even years later. Alas.)

For dessert, we got something that I'm totally going to make sometime and people will, in turn, steal the idea from me and in this way thousands of people will end meals happy and satisfied, indulged but not overwrought. Nostalgic but hip.

It was this:

Warm chocolate-chocolate chip cookies and little milkshakes in generous shot glasses.

It's like a French Laundry sort of thing, like coffee and doughnuts or peanut butter and jellies, only it doesn't take 47 hours, a $100 chinois (how I covet thee, and Thomas Keller swears I would be a better person with you in my kitchen), six yards of cheesecloth, and 200 sous chefs to make.

Cloud Dessert

Last year I saw this delicious looking cloud, and ever since have had my eye out for the equivalent dessert. Recently, Nancy gave me the cookbook A Year in My Kitchen, written by Skye Gyngell, head palate at the Petersham Nurseries Cafe in London.

In the autumn section, I found a dessert that looked a lot like clouds. And seemed like it might taste like clouds too. Last night, we did a Gyngell-inspired dinner over at Nancy's, and after feasting on the fantastic combinations of sweet, savory, and meatily complex flavors of lamb with prunes, corainder (cilantro), and spices; sweet potato puree with tamari, maple syrup, and chili; and roasted squash with roasted tomatoes, feta, and basil oil, we tried it out.

The cloud dessert is called apple and eau-de-vie snow. The quick summary is that you stew Pippin apples in a vanilla-sugar syrup, blend it in the food processor, whip egg whites until they're stiff, blend the two elements together, and then put the mixture in the ice cream maker. As it's turning into a frozen cluster of clouds you add the eau-de-vie (I actually added Calvados because it's what I had on hand). The result is a light, cold but not too icy, apple with a kick, truly white as snow dessert that's unlike anything else I've ever had. It is apple clouds.

Here's the recipe:

Put 8.8 ounces of sugar, 500 ml of water, and a vanilla bean pod split in half in a pot over medium heat. Stir to dissolve sugar, and then bring to a simmer.

Peel, core, and chop 6 Pippin apples, then add them to the syrup mixture and cook for about 5 minutes, keeping the syrup at a simmer, until the apples are tender but not mushy. Turn off the heat and let the apples hang out in the syrup until they are cool.

Remove the apples with a slotted spoon and blend in a food processor along with 2 tablespoons of the syrup until it's pale and smooth.

Whip eight egg whites (since they're eaten raw, look for free-range, small-farm, organic eggs) and a pinch of salt to firm peaks. Add the apple puree. Now here she says blend lightly with a whisk, but the weight of the apples doesn't facilitate an easy blending, so I'd suggest folding with a spatula instead.

Pour the mixture into an ice cream maker and process. This amount makes enough for two batches in a standard home machine. When the mixture starts to look like ice cream, add two tablespoons of apple eau-de-vie (or calvados) and continue to churn until it you have a "soft, feathery, light slush." Serve immediately.

Verjus sorbet and poached peach

I'm working backwards here, starting with dessert, but as with meal planning, so with meal descriptions. This is the verjus sorbet and poached peach dessert from the French Laundry cookbook. The split in the peach is accidental (I forgot I was cutting the peach into thirds and not halves), but I think the rest of it looks about right.

Here's the thing about poached fruit, I like it, but I don't love it. But we already had these large peaches, and I wanted to make something seasonal, especially since the days are growing shorter and the mornings are chillier and it's only a matter of time before the summer fruit disappears and daylight savings time ends. And, I was very curious about the sorbet.

First I looked for verjus at Monterey Market. The guy (I think his name is Marty? I can't remember now) who stocks the vinegars said they didn't carry it, but that lately he's been getting more requests and is going to look into getting some. Next I stopped in at Magnani, hoping that they might carry it, but alas they did not, and then at the Coffee and Cheese shop, where my favorite woman there told me they didn't have it either.

Walking back, I called Nancy, who suggested the Pasta Shop down on Fourth Street. I called down there, and they had it! In fact, they had two kinds, one was a Sangiovese verjus and the other (the one I bought) was the regular kind.

From the back of the bottle and the introduction to the recipe, I've discovered the verjus was a Roman invention that was popular in French kitchens in the 14th and 15th centuries. Made from unripened white grapes, verjus is an acidulant like vinegar or lemon juice, but milder than either, and doesn't mask the flavors of the dish that it's added to.

The taste is singular. It's tart and particularly fruity but not sweet at all, a grape flavor stripped of sugar. It was really a bit of an object lesson, because after tasting it, I found it suddenly easier to see where the complexity in wine comes from. It has an appealing scent; if there were a verjus perfume, I would consider wearing it.

The sorbet was simply verjus and corn syrup chilled then processed in the ice cream maker. The result was a slightly tart, perfumy, delicate ice. And in appearance it slightly resembled a cloud. Speaking of which, I found a recipe for a French macaroon type cookie nicknamed "little clouds." Expect to hear more about that one soon.

Mint-basil chocolate chunk ice cream

Last night I went to Nancy and John's for dinner. Ok, really I went for dessert, but I also ate dinner there.

John had tweaked the mint-basil chocolate chunk ice cream recipe from the new Scharffen Berger cookbook, and what he came up with was so good, I blew past seconds and went straight into third-and-a-halfs.

He added egg yolks, because he believes, as I do, that ice cream texture is much better when you start out with an egg custard base. He also said, and I think he was speculating but maybe he read it, that the recipe omitted eggs because it was so intent on giving the ice cream a bright green color (the recipe calls for a bit of spinach leaves to brighten the color), and the yolks would dull the green.

I've had basil-lemon ice cream before, as well as basil-something-else-I-can't-remember, but I've never had basil and mint together, and I really really have never had basil and chocolate together. The combination worked though. Really well. The basil and the mint played off each other and each kept the other from being one-dimensional. I'm not sure I ever realized how complimentary the flavors are, at least in this context.

The basil worked along the mint theme, but created all these other nuances that built a complexity that could hold its own against the chocolate. But in a delicious way, not a confrontational, rumble-in-your-mouth way.

Mint Julep ice cream

I'm pretty sure it's a great idea. The bourbon ice cream was great. The fresh mint ice cream was great. Will the combination translate as well as its individual parts do? I think it might.

I promise I'll stop talking about ice cream as soon as summer is over

...or at least that I'll stop talking about ice cream so much. But I'll probably talk about soup and maybe chocolate croissant bread pudding way more.

To celebrate the first day of the Tour de France, I invited cycling enthusiasts over and made bourbon ice cream. Here's the thing about bourbon ice cream: it's really, really good. I'm not a huge fan of bourbon; I don't have the palate and I'm not into pretending to be in a 70s political-intrigue movie, nor am I an Aaron Sorkin character. But as it turns out, if you add bourbon to a creamy custard and then freeze it, well then I love it.

Some of the smokiness remains, but the sweet cream somehow expands the flavor upwards and outwards. The only way I can describe it is that I experience bourbon mostly as a lead marble being dropped into a bucket, but that bourbon ice cream is more like a wide raft with a sail. Probably not helpful, but it's the best I can do.

I made little langue du chats (langues du chat?) as disks and then shaped them into tiny bowls in which to serve the ice cream. The only problem was that there was a slight storage miscommunication, and in an attempt to hide the cookies from the animals while we were out of the house, Joel refrigerated them, which made it so they never crisped properly.

I used the Eagle Rare Single Barrel Bourbon that Jerm and Liz brought to the housewarming and the bourbon ice cream recipe from Chez Panisse Desserts. Sadly, tomorrow I have to return all the cookbooks, as their owners are arriving back home.

Ice cream ends the egg saga

To summarize the now-ended saga of the three dozen eggs: most went to the two batches of ice cream and the rest to Eva's poached-egg-and-soldier appetizer.

More about the ice cream

I had a ton of cherries (Rainier) because I initially thought I'd make a clafoutis, but then I was looking through the Chez Panisse Desserts book and found a recipe for cherry ice cream with kirsch. The cherries were simmered then blended, but I left them a little chunky. The kirsch went in right before blending (not because the recipe called for it, but because I didn't have any in the house when I was making the ice cream custard). The final product was good, but I actually think I don't love cherry ice cream. Maybe if I had used bing cherries, the flavor would have been able to stand up to all that dairy, but I felt like, as it was, it sort of lacked personality. The kirsch gave it a nice kick though.

I also made salted caramel ice cream. I used this David Lebovitz recipe, but left out the praline. Sometimes when I'm making caramel, I have trouble getting it to achieve that perfect brown, but this time it was no problem. Is that because I was using TJ's organic cane sugar that was already a little bit tan? I have no idea. But since it worked so well, I'll use it again in the future.

This ice cream was the all-around favorite. It was very rich and sweet--best eaten in small scoops with a crunchy cookie--but opinions differed on whether the caramel praline would have made it too sweet or just added a nice texture.

I'll certainly make the salted caramel ice cream again, but I may look for ways to pare down the sweet just a little bit. It was turned up to 11, but I think it would be better at about 8. Adding the salt doesn't have a super-dramatic impact but it does give the sweet something to play off of, and adds some depth to what would otherwise be a pure sugar bomb. Or in this case bombe? Sorry.