Week Nine: Tea and coffee

I already made a tea ice cream for Chinese New Year week, so I decided this week would be coffee. I really wanted to be a coffee snob; as you’ve seen, I like tinkering with culinary based hobbies, I think I would have loved trying different beans and ways of grinding and experimenting with the temperatures and drip rates. One minor problem: I don’t like the taste of coffee. I once spent a week with my colleagues thinking I was pregnant because I said the smell of their coffee was making me feel sick, but that’s just how it gets me sometimes. It goes away, I’m not always quite that adverse to coffee even if I don’t like it myself, but I still hear about it as ‘the time (I) tried to ban coffee’; I didn’t, I bought everyone lids for their mugs, and yet the slander persists.

The nice thing about this recipe is, it’s essentially just an ice cream I already know how to make - custard ice cream - with some coffee beans thrown in. No formulating needed and, because the coffee beans infuse before being strained out, they don’t need to be factored into the recipe in the way adding a shot of brewed coffee would. (The original recipes say you can do this but it’ll turn the ice cream brown, which Jeanes openly describes as ‘disagreeable’ and Jarrin’s tone heavily implies this is not a desirable outcome.) Nutt used a lot less coffee which sort of appealed but Jarrin and Jeanes both agreed on four ounces and so I went with four ounces. They call for mocha beans; we tend to think of mocha as coffee and chocolate, but to the Gunter’s confectioners it would have meant a specific type of coffee bean which has a natural chocolatey flavour. Mocha coffee is named for a port in Yemen, although mine are not from Yemen, they are from Ethiopia via Whittard, a tea and coffee shop in the UK. I was an idiot because I converted four ounces to grams in order to work out how much to buy, and only then did I see that the website had the weights listed in ounces.

Ingredients

Use the percentages to make as much as you like.

516.24g single (19% butterfat) cream (58.76%)
61.76g whipping (39.5% butterfat) cream (7.03%)
120g egg yolk (13.66%)
180.54g caster sugar (20.55%)
[113.35g mocha coffee beans (12.9% of total weight)]

Method

1. Put creams, egg yolk, sugar and coffee into a saucepan.

2. Heat and constantly whisk until a custard is just formed, when a line is just about remaining when drawn into the mixture on the back of a metal spoon.

3. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for an hour.

4. Put mixture through a sieve to remove the coffee beans, and chill for at least four hours, preferably overnight. (If needed, reduce to 20C using an ice bath, but some cooling will have happened during the hour.)

5. Rewhisk just prior to churning.

6. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping at soft serve texture.

7. Put ice cream into a container and harden in freeze for several hours, preferably overnight.

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1dYtKjpQdJKVO1SDwxOELVvDjPuiS5s3p
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1Kpvx9QLpLTlbhieFPPqF8qMvYiUs3XPw

Simply put, this one is lovely. I’m not a fan of coffee and wouldn’t order coffee ice cream, but this is delicious. Not much more to say.

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