Week Eleven: Irish

I sort of wish Irish week had come later in the year because I’m going to Ireland and could have used some first hand research, but it didn’t and so I’m going stereotypical instead. Guinness. “But you said you aren’t a drinker”, I can hear. I’m not. They make 0% alcohol Guinness now. I’d never tried it until last week, as someone who was never a drinker I don’t really feel the need for fake alcohol, it’s not like there’s a taste I’m missing. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t impressed; I had to spoon the foam off because otherwise I could only manage enough in a mouthful to get foam, and I chased it down with several glasses of water. My friend tells me if I was a drinker I’d probably like it more, but that’s like people that tell you a TV show gets better after the first season - maybe it does, but why would I watch it for that long? I did consider adding something else to the ice cream to take away from the taste, like chocolate (malt and chocolate is almost a classic pairing) or vanilla, but ultimately decided that’s not really the point of making Guinness ice cream. If it turns out to be halfway good, it could be experimented with later on. First, I had to figure out how to get the Guinness into an ice cream.

There aren’t many alcohol based Gunter’s ice cream recipes: two to be precise, from Jarrin and Jeanes. Maraschino and noyau, so they’re both liqueur and they’re both in cream bases (they’re the same recipe, they literally say for the noyau ‘follow the maraschino recipe but use noyau instead’.) Both simply say to use as much as will flavour it to your taste, which is not helpful, especially not when your taste would be to leave it out entirely. As the Gunter’s alcohol ice cream recipes are in cream bases, it’s also not helpful that every Guinness ice cream recipe on the internet is in a custard base, including the one from Guinness. (Although to be fair, a lot of ice creams on the internet are custard based, I’m not sure why.) The official Guinness one did give me an idea on how to incorporate an ingredient that is about 96% water into an ice cream, though: made a reduction. Reductions aren’t named in the Gunter’s books, but syrups are and they are essentially a fruit reduction. There wasn’t complete consistency in how much sugar went with how much liquid, but four and a quarter pounds of sugar to two pints of liquid seemed to be a fairly common ratio. There also wasn’t consistency in how long to boil the syrup for, but I decided to go for what’s called ‘the large pearl’ - put a bit of the syrup on your first finger, press your finger and thumb together and then move them to be as far apart as possible, if the syrup forms a strand without breaking it’s at the large pearl stage. At least this was the plan; in reality, boiling Guinness with sugar is extremely hot and I couldn’t actually touch it, plus it bubbled and frothed before reaching that stage. I stopped after it had been bubbling for a little under three minutes. Sugar doesn’t evaporate, so because I weighed what went in and what went out, and knew the same amount of sugar was in it, I worked out that my syrup was almost exactly 70% sugar and 30% water. In making the Guinness reduction, I lost about 30% of the water that was present in the Guinness.

Ingredients - for Guinness syrup 

These are the exact amounts I used, however unless you’re going to make a lot of Guinness ice cream, read the note - the amounts here make over a kilogram of syrup.

607.44g Guinness (I used Guinness 0%; you could use alcoholic Guinness if preferred) (38.66%)

963.88g caster sugar (61.34%)

You lose a little over 10% of the starting weight during the reducing process. I’d suggest figure out how much syrup you want, add on about 100g to give yourself some room for variation, then multiply it by 1.1, and then use the percentages on that. So, to make the amount of syrup for 1000g of ice cream mixture (below) I’d need about 287g of syrup, so call it 390 x 1.1 = 429g total syrup weight. That would be 165.85g of Guinness and 263.15g of caster sugar.

Method - for Guinness syrup 

1. Put the Guinness and sugar into a pan.

2. Heat until there is a continuous bubbling on the surface. 

3. Continue to boil for about 2.5 minutes, then remove from the heat.

4. Allow to cool, for best food safety use an ice bath until the syrup is below 20C and then put it in the fridge to cool completely.

Ingredients - for Guinness ice cream

As always, I’ve given the percentages so this recipe can scale, but I made 1000g.

399.8g single (19% butterfat) cream (39.98%)

313g whipping (39.5% butterfat) cream (31.3%)

287.2g Guinness syrup, cooled (28.72%)

Method - for Guinness ice cream

I actually hand whisked it the first time, and then used the stand mixer on the second pass.

1. Put all ingredients into a mixing bowl.

2. Whisk together.

3. Put mixture into the fridge for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

4. Whisk again just before churning. 

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

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

This one turned out to surprise me. First of all, the Guinness and the Guinness syrup were unpleasant, I did not like the taste of them at all and expected the finished ice cream to be disgusting based on that. But secondly, once I’d made the mixture, I had a spoonful of it and could taste … nothing. It tasted exactly like plain ice cream, because only about 8.5% of the recipe turned out to be Guinness, the rest was either cream or sugar. So I was expecting it to either taste disgusting or taste like plain ice cream; that it tasted of a light, sweet malt should perhaps not be surprising by logic but it did surprise me. Early on in my making of historic ice creams, before I started this blog, I made brown bread ice cream - this tastes very similar, just without the bits of bread. I wouldn’t say I love it as an ice cream, but I don’t dislike it either and I thought I would.