Week Eight: With a Twist

I was initially not sure what to do for With a Twist week. The first thought was some form of drink/cocktail based ice cream, taking ‘with a twist’ as in ‘scotch on the rocks.’ But, I don’t drink, and none of the classic drinks that come with a twist (a twist being a small slice of fruit, usually citrus of some sort) had easy non-alcoholic versions; they tend to be very alcohol based, unlike something like a piña colada which essentially turns into a pineapple coconut milkshake. There was an excellent cocktail bar in Wrexham (yes, the city where Ryan Reynolds owns the football team) called Voodoo Moon that made the best virgin piña coladas, and everything really - I’m still sad it’s closed now. I digress. No cocktail based ice cream. So instead I looked at other uses of ‘with a twist’, and landed on the Todd Rundgren album With A Twist, bossa nova style versions of his previous songs, and I thought yes. Brazil. 

(I promise this becomes relevant in a minute.) We tend to think of vegetarianism and veganism as a new trend, but it has ancient roots - the Indus Valley civilisation, many Ancient Greek philosophers, Porphyry wrote On Abstinence from Animal Food (often referred to in the Latin De Abstentia) in around 269BCE; a little later, al-Ma’arrī, an Arabian poet, wrote ‘I No Longer Steal From Nature’ in around 1000CE. The first cookbook that is commonly taken to be vegan was published in 1849, following an earlier vegetarian cookbook published in 1835 by the same author, Asenath Nicholson. When I started looking at the foods of Brazil and saw that cashews and something called cumaru featured in the indigenous diet, I decided to use With a Twist to make vegan ice cream but in the style of the Gunter’s confectioners, aka high fat and high sugar. The basis of it will be cashew milk and butter, with tonka bean flavouring, tonka beans being the seed of the cumaru tree. They’re illegal in the USA - apparently Americans can’t be trusted to not gorge themselves on them - so if you’re in the USA and want to make this ice cream, use vanilla with a little bit of cinnamon instead, it’s a similar flavour. 

Ingredients

As always, use the percentages to make as much as you want; I made 800g.

170.32g cashew milk, unflavoured (21.29%)

264g cashew butter, unflavoured (33%)

206.64g water (25.83%)

159.04g caster sugar (19.88%)

(About 0.25% of the total weight in tonka beans; my recipe used a large bean weighing approximately 2g)

Method

1. Put the cashew milk, cashew butter, water and sugar into a pan. 

2. Heat up whilst whisking constantly to fully mix the ingredients.

3. Grate the tonka bean into the mixture and stir it in.

4. Leave to chill for several hours, preferably overnight; for best food safety, use an ice bath to rapidly chill to 20C before placing in the fridge.

5. Rewhisk just prior to churning.

6. Sieve just prior to churning; the mixture will be very thick and will probably need encouraging through the sieve.

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

8. Put into a container and freeze for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

Did this make a nice vegan ice cream? It certainly made something that tastes nice (although perhaps a little spicy; I like spicy in savoury food, but not in sweet and I don’t like cinnamon, which tonka bean tastes a lot like) and approximates the texture of Gunter’s ice cream, although it is a lot harder. Look what it did to my spoon!

Would I bother making it again? Probably not. Not because it’s unpleasant, but it involves having a lot of ingredients I don’t otherwise use. I have lots of uses for cream apart from ice cream; I now have the majority of a litre carton of cashew milk that will never be used, and I don’t like wasting food (or drink, technically.)