Red bean ice cream

queenscook · October 28, 2015, 4:00pm

I have to train myself to remember to post here, and not (only) on CH. I posted this yesterday there, but now that so many are here, let me ask it here.

So I made some red bean ice cream today. Since I keep kosher, I couldn’t buy a can of sweetened azuki beans (I didn’t check, but can’t imagine there are any brands with kosher supervision), so I made my own with a can of unsweetened beans and cooked them up with some sugar. So far, so good.
When they tasted sweet enough, I mashed half and left the other half whole. I made an ice cream base, essentially following the method of Jeni Britton Bauer. When everything had chilled, I added the mashed half of the beans to the base and churned it, but waited until it was done and out of the machine to add the whole beans, so that they didn’t get smashed up; I was looking for the texture of the beans in the smoother base. At this point all was still great. Later, once it had firmed up in the freezer after four or five hours, I tasted it. OK . . . here’s the problem. The beans are like little tasteless rocks. They are no longer soft, and while I’m not exactly afraid of chipping a tooth, they certainly are not a pleasant sensation to bite down on.

Does anyone have a suggestion, either for helping this batch (probably unlikely), or for another time?

kattyeyes · October 29, 2015, 1:21pm

Hmm. It’s been a while since I’ve had red bean ice cream, but I don’t recall whole pieces of beans in it–do you? In some of my stranger gelati (sweet corn, for example), I use an immersion blender. Sounds like red bean would also benefit from a blitz. The only hard things (and not as hard as a frozen bean) in any of my creations would be frozen chocolate bits.

ETA: Lookie here for an example, they use paste:

NotJrvedivici · October 29, 2015, 3:33pm

Hi Queenscook! I’m sorry I don’t have any help for your specific request, I was just wondering since this is a semi-kosher question if you could also post this on the Kosher board as well. Some feed back has been that the kosher board is a little slow with new topics.

(If I’m off base I apologize in advance!!)

queenscook · October 29, 2015, 4:10pm

I appreciate the thought and the idea, but it’s really not a kosher question per se. If it were about finding kosher red bean paste, that would be another story, but that I was able to concoct myself. I’m not sure who’s populating the kosher board here, but at the other place, I’m not sure if there were all that many readers who made their own ice cream or had much expertise in it. In fact, I wonder how many readers on the kosher boards would even be familiar with red bean ice cream–or would even consider eating ice cream with beans in it! Even there I posted the question in Home Cooking, and got a couple of suggestions that I had already considered, and think I’ll go with next time. (Mainly to leave out the whole beans in the base itself, but serve them over the top or mix them in at serving time. The other suggestion was logical–get sugar into the beans so they don’t freeze so hard–but not really possible, since the skin of the beans seems to keep the sugar from permeating them.)