Week Five: Nerdy Week

One of the bizarre things in the Harry Potter universe is how mundane the food is, although I’ve heard from many non-English fans that there are plenty of foods other people assumed were magical but no, they’re just British and weird. Like treacle tart - apparently that isn’t a thing in America? Seeing as I’m also British and weird, these foods didn’t seem magical to me and we’re back to my mundane point. When I saw week five of 52 Weeks of Ice Cream was nerdy week, I had the idea of recreating a weird flavour from the wizarding world, but there aren’t really any. I haven’t yet figured out how to get ice cream to not melt, and everything else was very normal. The weirdest it got was strawberry and peanut butter, not two flavours I’ve ever thought of putting together personally although thinking about it, it’s the same as a PB&J sandwich.

Strawberry and peanut butter has the bonus of being basically an ice cream I already know how to make - strawberry was actually the second Gunter’s ice cream I ever made, after plain, although I did mess up the maths and made what I called STRAWBERRY. It was very strawberry. I fixed the recipe for later batches. So, strawberry sorted, I turned to the peanut butter. You may have noticed at some point in your life that peanut butter isn’t very pliable, it’s really more dry and sticky. I turned to one of my first and favourite ice cream books for ideas on how to get peanut butter to be more liquid, Dana Cree’s Hello My Name Is Ice Cream. She suggested combining peanut butter with coconut oil, and I dutifully purchased the deodorised coconut oil to do it. However, before I got to making it, I watched one of Anti Chef’s videos on homemade Reese’s peanut butter cups, which simply mixed peanut butter with butter to make a liquid mixture. Butter seemed more in spirit with the Gunter’s confectioners than deodorised coconut oil, so in the end I went with that.

To take a circle back to my first paragraph, I understand there’s a peanut butter in the USA called Jif? Well, to me, Jif is a floor cleaning product. So when I see Jif referenced in a culinary context, I feel as confused as American readers of Harry Potter do when spotted dick is brought up and yet Harry isn’t in the STD clinic.

Ingredients

For the strawberry ice cream:

I made 700g of this, as always the percentages can be used to make any amount you like.

147.98g single (19% fat) cream (21.14%)

282.73g whipping (39% fat) cream (40.39%)

134.4g caster sugar (19.2%)

134.89g strawberry juice (19.27%) (I manually push strawberries through a sieve to get this juice)

10.85g lemon juice (1.55%)

For the peanut butter:

You want a 3:1 ratio of peanut butter to unsalted butter; I made 32.41% of the ice cream weight, but think in future I’d lower this to about 26%. The weights given here are for the 32.41% amount.

170.13g smooth peanut butter (75%)

56.71g unsalted butter (25%)

Method

(I use a stand mixer and balloon whisk, you can do this manually. I also use a microwave to make the peanut swirl, this could be done on a hob.) 

1. Put the creams, strawberry juice and lemon juice into a mixing bowl.

2. Slowly whisk the caster sugar in. 

3. Leave the mixture to chill for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

4. Re-whisk just before churning.

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

6. Whilst the ice cream is churning, put the peanut butter and unsalted butter into a microwave safe bowl. 

7. Melt the peanut butter and unsalted butter together; this took about two minutes on high in my microwave, with stirring in the middle.

8. As the ice cream is reaching soft serve texture, slowly drizzle the peanut butter mix directly into the ice cream - it should freeze into little pieces as it churns.

9. Put the ice cream into a container, and place into the freezer to harden for several hours.

This is a very good ice cream, although a little too much peanut butter for me - as said above, the amount here uses nearly 33% of the ice cream weight for the peanut butter addition, and I think lowering this to about 26% would be more appealing to me. But it’s delicious nonetheless, although best enjoyed in cone form.

When licked rather than chewed, the flecks of peanut butter melt in your mouth and the flavours of strawberry and peanut butter combine. Plus, it’s as cones that Harry, Ron and Hermione enjoyed it as they walked around Diagon Alley.