I wish I still had lemon verbena in my backyard!
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Did you get frost already ?
I live at Sea Level in the SF Bay Area, so frost is both rare and brief, and many plants will survive winters unscathed. In my case, some neglect made necessary by circumstance, along with irrigation issues, means that the only things currently thriving (other than the weeds) are the lemon and plum trees and rosemary bush, which mostly chug along even through drought when ignored.
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I really wanted to try the strawberry sauce here, so I made a buttermilk custard ice cream to swirl it with.
The sauce really is remarkable. It has an incredibly potent, fresh strawberry flavor and is super thick.
I strained it to make sure it was silky smooth.
I did find it need a pinch of salt and also some more acidity, which will vary depending on strawberries. I added malic acid. I also thought it was a bit sweet, but knowing I’d be freezing it I was hesitant to cut the sugar. I tested a batch as I had made it by freezing a part of it. It froze solid rather than fluid, but wasn’t icy. It tastes creamy when it hits your tongue. Seeing this I decided to go ahead and increase everything proportionally except the sugar so that it would be 50% sugar rather than the 67% it is as written. It still freezes the same.
I thought later that using dextrose for part of the sugar could help keep it even softer, but as I said it works perfectly this way because it dissolves smoothly on the tongue when eating the ice cream. I’ve been wondering if something like pectin NH would help make a berry sauce that stays fluid, but perhaps something like locust bean gum would be better for ice crystal suppression.
The ice cream is based on this, but I modified it a lot to give it a higher PAC value so it would freeze softer. I upped the powdered milk to 70 grams, reduced the sugar to 70 grams sucrose, used 45 grams dextrose, and instead of xanthan gum I used locust bean gum, lambda carrageenan, and guar gum. I also cooked this base sous vide with only the cream being heated.
The sauce truly tastes completely different from cooked down ones used to make ripples. The fresh strawberry flavor is very intense!
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What a food scientist you are!!!
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Hardly, but, I’m trying to be because ice cream science is pretty fun, and doable with an ice cream calculator! Unfortunately I don’t have windows, so the best ice cream calculator is not available to me, but I’m making do with the one from Dream Scoops. The first time I tried to formulate I used a pen and notebook and a calculator and that takes a long time!
I made gingersnap ice cream loosely based on Claudia Fleming’s recipe and I loved it. I was concerned it wouldn’t be well-received since it’s a strong flavor, but everyone liked it!
Fleming’s recipe calls for 12 yolks and a lot of milk and little cream. The butterfat content is low, but the abundance of yolks kicks the ice cream into 14% fat territory.
I have 27% fat cream and I saw no need for all those yolks, so I adjusted the recipe to have just two yolks and mostly cream.
I eliminated the white sugar and replaced it with dextrose for more freezing point depression and less sweetness, and used only 80 g of brown sugar rather than the 1/2 cup she called for. I added 70 g milk powder and kept the molasses, which is around 44 g by weight. I used 1 g locust bean gum, .5 gram guar gum, and .25 g lambda carrageenan to stabilize. I ended up with around 15% fat and 14% sugar, which is lower than Fleming’s while producing a softer ice cream and with a cleaner flavor due to using fewer eggs.
After steeping the dairy with all the spices (lots of black pepper, fresh ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a little cardamom), I cooked the base sous vide.
This ice cream is perfectly scoopable out of the freezer. I suspect it had a PAC of at least 24.0 due to the molasses. I think the freezer was going through a defrost cycle earlier today and the ice cream was actually precariously soft for a few hours.
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Satsuma plum ice cream, using the recipe in the Perfect Scoop. I’ve made many a plum frozen yogurt and sorbet with my backyard crops, but for some reason never ice cream. I made and froze the fruit base back in August, with the last of this year’s plums, and finished and churned it up a couple of days ago. It’s just sliced plums cooked with a little water until tender, then sugar stirred in (I also added a bit of salt), blended with a cup of cream. Instead of adding a teaspoon of vodka or kirsch, I added 2 tablespoons of homemade plum liqueur, which has a white wine base and is fortified with some sugar and vodka, so it’s much lower in alcohol.
This came out great. I used about the sugar amount Lebovitz calls for, and the finished ice cream has nice little tart edge, since satsumas have a good sweet-tart balance, and an intense fruit flavor. I like it better than the frozen yogurts, without the yogurt’s tang competing with the plum flavor.
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Trial run of lemon verbena ice cream with berry swirl; I wanted to test if I liked the combination enough to make a subsequent batch with the swirl incorporated in the frozen ice cream.
Here, I had the swirl already made, so I doused a cone of plain lemon verbena with it to see if I liked it.
Tl,dr: Hell yeah. Already made the swirled batch and it’s freezing now 
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I adapted Serious Eats’ strawberry ice cream to use frozen strawberries and also a lot of other changes. Obviously I did not bother with the maceration aspect since the fresh strawberries here are crap and I’m quite happy to have the strawberries be only in purée form.
The original recipe breaks down to this.
Sugar: 26.4%
Fat: 4.6%
Milk Solids Non-fat: 3.4%
Total Solids: 35.6%
POD (relative sweetness): 21
PAC: 28.9
The strawberry purée ends up being about 30%
There’s some additional stuff to take into account with the bit of alcohol that leaches out of the macerated strawberries and the sweetness they add, but I can’t really account for that and it’s relatively minor.
The fat level is very good because this is a fruit ice cream and a low fat level allows the fruit flavor to shine. Half and half is made up of light cream (18%) and milk, so it’s less fatty than if you use half a cup of heavy cream and half milk. Now for myself I typically have to adjust my ratios of cream to milk because I’m working with 27% cream. In this case I should have used more milk to cream to bring the fat level down, but I decided to keep it simple and leave it alone. So my fat percentage is higher, but still under 10%, which is what I wanted.
I really wanted to try using sweet cream buttermilk powder in a fruit ice cream because it has lots of phospholipids which help to emulsify, so an ice cream that contains no eggs or soy lecithin seemed like a great place to try it out. And unlike cultured buttermilk it wouldn’t add a tangy flavor, which is nice with strawberries, but I wanted a basic strawberry flavor here.
My version cuts out all the corn syrup and adds 100 g of buttermilk powder. I cut the sugar down to 100 grams of sucrose and 30 g dextrose.
For flavoring I added some citric acid to taste instead of using lemon juice.
I stabilized with .6 g locust bean gum, .3 g guar gum, and .15 g lambda carrageenan
I end up with:
Sugar: 14.3%
Fat: 7% (probably a tiny bit higher because sweet cream buttermilk powder has more fat than non-fat milk powder)
Milk solids non-fat: 12.6% (not exactly since the buttermilk powder isn’t exactly the same)
Total solids: 35.6%
POD (relative sweetness): 15
PAC: 24.6
My PAC is lower since it’s a lot less sugar and also I wanted it no higher than this. I actually adjusted to get it down because when my freezer goes through defrost, ice cream with a higher PAC than this will be in danger of melting.
I’d shoot for a bit less sugar in another type of ice cream, but fruit ice creams are a bit higher than other types of ice cream, so 14% is good. Typical fruit ice creams are 18-22% and the original SE recipe was higher still.
Relative sweetness is higher than I’d want normally, but again, fruit ice cream.
I absolutely LOVE this ice cream. It’s got a great texture and delicious bright strawberry flavor and isn’t too sweet. It’s got 32% strawberry purée, which is higher than typical homemade and commercial strawberry ice cream. My goal is to shoot for 40% someday if I ever get my hands on some inulin, but I’m quite happy with this. I’ll be modifying milk and cream to test lowering the fat content to the original percentage at some point, though.
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Pretty sure writing that post without including a luscious photo is a breach of forum rules, @Shellybean 
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I’m thinking of making profiteroles today, so you might see it then. 
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A lot of people don’t get why you can’t just go to their kitchen and make the same things, and it’s really not so much that the equipment is different (although obviously important), it’s that only in your own kitchen are you familiar with all the quirks of the equipment.
When I tried to make profiteroles I went to friend next door’s house. The power was on and she still has a gas oven that can be lit manually. Unfortunately her oven took longer to heat up than I thought it would (and bc I’m not familiar enough with her oven it’s a bit of a guess when turning it on if it will hit that temp— I of course bring my thermometer to see) . When I put the tray in I watched the temperature drop precipitously and it was a while before it finally came back to 400°. Unsurprisingly, it was a failure.
So that’s why you see an attempt at ice cream cannoli.
Delicious, but rather inconvenient given the need to fill to order and with a shorter shelf life than even profiteroles.
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Modernist Cuisine At Home has a peanut butter and jelly gelato that I know people are making into plain peanut butter. The recipe uses fruit juice and no dairy, along with roasted peanut oil. It clocks in at around 18% fat and around 11% sugar. So it makes sense that according to people it freezes hard but not icy.
When making peanut butter ice cream, the challenge is that you’re adding in basically 100% solids. And when making ice cream you’re trying to keep the solids somewhere between 30-45% solids ideally. So a lot of ice cream recipes with peanut butter don’t have that much (for example Jeni Britton Bauer uses just 1/2 cup for her peanut butter ice cream), and really peanut butter is strong enough that you don’t need a ton of it.
To keep the solids down, no eggs, more milk than cream, and no powdered milk are some things that help, along with using invert sugars.
I had looked at this recipe and it just seemed insane to me. The solids are crazy high with the peanut butter and using half and half, and also the sugar is quite high. The reviews of the recipe reflect this with people complaining about how crumbly it is.
The Modernist recipe by using juice/water not only gives a more pure peanut butter flavor, but eliminates solids you’d get from dairy. However, I don’t have access to Loriva’s roasted peanut oil, which is the only way I’d maybe be okay with throwing a bunch of liquid oil into an ice cream since I know it’s a delicious oil. So I decided to employ a little cream in order to up the fat content (still much lower than the original) without the solids getting too high. I also used 90 grams of sucrose rather than 125 and used 35 grams in dextrose and 60 g of honey since this ice cream could afford more sugar and honey being liquid doesn’t contain as many solids.
I ended up with:
500 g water
180 g cream (27% fat)
90 g sucrose
30 g dextrose
60 g honey
25 g tapioca starch
.3 g xanthan gum
210 g natural peanut butter
And salt to taste
I am thrilled with the flavor of this ice cream and the texture is almost perfect, but I do think it helps to have a Vitamix to make the natural peanut butter super smooth. I used my Vitamix immersion blender, and while it’s powerful, it’s not quite the same. There’s just a bit of peanut texture, but otherwise the ice cream is very creamy and smooth. I swirled it with some chocolate sauce and it’s the kind of flavor I have a hard time staying away from. I might bake some soft oatmeal cookies and make sandwiches with it.
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Ohhh that sounds amazing.
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Well, in all this time I built my own ice cream calculator and have been loving using it, but hadn’t made any ice cream until yesterday.
Made a lemon-ginger custard ice cream with raspberry swirl, lemon curd, and the pistachio joconde scraps I had saved. Love how this turned out!
I played around with the CI sauce and I’m in love. This sauce stays soft and gooey when frozen and has the most intense raspberry flavor. I achieved it by using dextrose for the bulk of the sugar amount.
The lemon curd is Dana Cree’s from Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream. It’s made with more sugar and some glucose (corn syrup in my case) in order to keep it soft. Lemon curd even when made with twice as much sugar as lemon juice is still tart and delicious. I typically don’t like curd with lots of butter emulsified in at the end (like the famous Pierre Herme lemon cream), but this one was delicious. Some pinches of salt were added, of course.
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Mmmmmm! What do you do with peppermint or candy cane ice cream, other than eat it?
That flavor combo sounds so delicious.
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I know someone who loves everything peppermint and she put it in my head to make some peppermint ice cream, which has such a pretty pink color that I find hard to resist.
Sandwiched between brownie cookies it would be great. Or made into macarons if you’re into that. Macaron shells are great for ice cream sandwiches.
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Can’t speak for @Shellybean but what I do with it is make some brownies and serve it like a little sundae with the ice cream.
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