Week Four: Savoury

This is actually one of the themes I suggested for the 52 Weeks of Ice Cream, so I didn’t want to let myself down for it! I am not the first person to make parmesan ice cream in recent times, early on in my historic ice cream explorations I wondered if anyone had done this and so encountered the marvellous Max Miller of Tasting History. Every Tuesday, I look forward to his new video, and I would encourage everyone with a vague interest in food or history to check his channel out. 

Parmesan ice cream is included in Nutt’s book, although this wouldn’t be Pineapple Encore if I didn’t attempt some modifications to how I’m doing it. Seeing as this is savoury week, I decided to make the ice cream less sweet than usual. Now, you can’t just leave sugar out of an ice cream, people try to do it, and inevitably ask the question ‘why did my ice cream freeze so hard?’ The answer is precisely because of the lack of sugar. Sugar holds on to water and in doing so softens the ice cream. So you can’t just remove it from the recipe and have it all stay the same, just less sweet; but you can use different types of sugar. The sugar we think of as sugar is sucrose, and it’s what’s called a disaccharide - two monosaccharides stuck together. There are lots of other types of sugar, the one I’m using here is glucose which is a monosaccharide. I think Dana Cree’s analogy to explain the chemical difference is the best I’ve encountered: imagine a monosaccharide is a person; two separate monosaccharides have four hands between them and can hold four things, but if those two monosaccharides join up and become a disaccharide, they only have two free hands (one each) because the other two are holding on to each other. Therefore, monosaccharides can hold on to twice as much water as the same amount of disaccharides. It stands to reason, then, that you can use half as much glucose as you can sucrose to achieve the same texture. As a bonus, glucose isn’t as sweet as sucrose, so this recipe should come out a lot less sweet than usual. Glucose wasn’t an option available to Nutt; it was first produced in 1811, in Russia, and it wasn’t produced in the UK until 1855. So Nutt would have known nothing about it, Jarrin might have and Jeanes possibly used it. 

The failed experiment

I actually made parmesan ice cream twice, once more or less completely faithfully to Nutt’s recipe (just adjusting the amount of butterfat, because boy did the Georgians like very high fat ice creams) and one I adjusted to replace sucrose with glucose to make it very savoury. Nutt, not having glucose, used a simple syrup - an equal mix of water and sugar - and I had doubts, but I really should learn to trust the Gunter’s confectioners. It was also during this recipe that I realised Nutt, unlike Jarrin and Jeanes, never specifies to only use egg yolks, but I’ve never had a custard fail yet using just the yolks so I decided to stay with it.

I said, back in my introduction, that I find it fun to explore ice cream with maths. Parmesan ice cream is a fantastic example of where the maths gets really interesting, and also shows why I should have just trusted Nutt in the first place.

It’s all about the water and the sugar here. I feared including a simple syrup rather than pure sugar would lead to too high a water content in the faithful parmesan ice cream, but the calculations show this isn’t the case. It’s on the high end of usual ranges, but so is the sugar (although not as high as I traditionally use) and there’s plenty of sugar to soak up that water and produce a soft, easily scoopable, non-icy ice cream. It actually has a lower water percentage than the glucose version. It’s also interesting to note that this ice cream recipe can have the butterfat brought down to a palatable percentage; the same can’t be said for the glucose based one.

Compare the glucose recipe: I decided to use an 11% sugar percentage as my aim, half the usual 22% I usually use, because glucose holds twice the water sucrose does. The water percentage is about the same, just slightly higher, as Nutt’s faithful recipe, but with 11% of glucose rather than 17% of sucrose it should produce a softer texture. Should. But it didn’t, it was actually much harder. It was also disgusting, a quote from Jurassic Park and Ian Malcolm springs to mind: I was so focused on whether I could, I didn’t stop to think about whether I should. It tasted like frozen carbonara, which it sort of is if you don’t get too caught up in whether you should use cream in a carbonara (I’m on team no cream, for what it’s worth) and what cheese you should use. Parmesan cheese is a strong flavour, and it was overpowering here, firstly because with less overall mass the cheese is taking up a comparatively high percentage of it, and secondly because it’s so much fattier. Too high a level of butterfat produces an odd texture, very filmy and unpleasant on the mouth, and it also allows for a slower release of flavour, which is good if it’s a flavour you like, but not so if it’s one you don’t! Again because of less overall mass, even using just single cream there was no way to bring the butterfat content to below the 14% considered maximum for a custard based ice cream. 

This is all a very long winded way of saying, Nutt had it right all along and about the only thing positive in my glucose recipe was I can say it is definitely very savoury. So the final version of parmesan ice cream is actually almost completely faithful to Nutt’s original recipe.

Ingredients 

As I often do, I made the amount that Nutt’s recipe gave but as always I’ve included the percentages so it can be scaled.

473.34g single (19% fat) cream (42.21%)

104.67 whipping (39% fat) cream (9.33%)

90g egg yolk (8.03%) (this was about six medium egg yolks)

368.41g simple syrup (32.85%) (simple syrup is equal amounts of water and sugar, heated until the sugar has fully dissolved)

85g parmesan cheese, grated (7.58%)

Method

I use a stand mixer with the balloon whisk attachment, but this can be done by hand.

1. Put the creams, egg yolks and simple syrup in a large saucepan.

2. Heat until fully combined, whisking constantly to avoid the egg scrambling.

3. Add the parmesan and whisk in until fully melted. When a line can be drawn in the custard on the back of a spoon, it is ready.

4. Pass the mixture through a sieve and chill for at least four hours, preferably overnight. For best food safety, use an ice bath to rapidly cool to 20C before putting in the fridge.

5. Just prior to churning, re-whisk the mixture.

6. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions.

7. When the ice cream resembles soft serve ice cream, place in a container and harden in the freeze for several hours at least.

The completely savoury parmesan ice cream was absolutely vile - it was melted down after the taste test. However, the faithful version is actually pretty nice. I’m not sure how closely it fits the savoury theme because it’s fairly sweet, but the parmesan adds an amazing tang to it and we often have modern recipes using cream cheese or goat’s cheese, so it’s not too out there to include cheese in an ice cream. It sounds dubious, and everyone that knew about it pulled a face, but try it - it’s pretty good. I might even make it again.