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?