Week Fifteen: Mix in madness

I don’t often use mix ins, which are what they say - they’re things that you mix in to ice cream, like chocolate chips for example. My preference is for smooth textures, and luckily for me that seemed to be the Georgian and Victorian preference too because most of the recipes are strained before churning. There are a few exceptions, and one of them was brown bread. No one ever likes the sound of this, and I’ll grant that brown bread isn’t the same as a cookie dough chunk. However it must have been a popular with the Victorian ice cream eaters, because there are a lot of brown bread ice cream recipes, and each of the Gunter’s confectioners had a different way of using brown bread in their ice cream. An amalgamation of them is what I used when I made brown bread ice cream ages ago, it was the second historic ice cream I ever made and long before this blog, but a bit like the chocolate ice creams I decided to properly try each one and come to a conclusion on which method is superior. This would be easier though - one thing I do like about mix ins is they, for the most part, don’t form part of the recipe. (There are some exceptions, but brown bread isn’t one of them.) They get added and stay separate, so I could just make a large batch of my plain ice cream base and the only variance is how the bread is prepared. I had been hoping that one of the Gunter’s confectioners had a brown bread recipe so I could use an authentic brown bread mix in, but they did not. Why would they? They were confectioners, not bakers. I’m not much of a baker either, so whilst I’m sure I could find a Victorian brown bread ice cream, I decided to do what the Gunter’s confectioners did - I got my brown bread from a bakery. 

For the second week in a row, there’s no new ice cream recipe (I promise the streak gets broken next week; next week actually has two recipes) but there are three ways of preparing brown bread for them. Each recipe uses 61.88g of brown bread for 722.5g of ice cream mixture (the amount ‘a pint of cream’ makes) or 8.5% of the ice cream weight in bread. Only Nutt gave any indication on how much bread to use, he said two handfuls; I have very little hands and two handfuls for me was 61.88g.

Brown bread ice cream a la Nutt: rasp it

Nutt tells you to rasp or grate the brown bread. This is not the easiest thing to do and I grated my fingers a couple of times.

Brown bread ice cream a la Jarrin: toast it

Jarrin tells you to brown the bread at the mouth of an oven, cut into small square slices. You can do this, or you can just lightly toast it - much more energy efficient.

Brown bread ice cream a la Jeanes: soak it

Jeanes tells you to soak the bread in a little syrup, which is 50% water and 50% sugar heated until the sugar has fully dissolved (I did this in a microwave.) I’d suggest cut the bread up before soaking it, and also make more than you need because it’s very nice to just eat.

In all cases, you add the bread to the churning ice cream when it’s a few minutes off of being fully churned. If you have a choice of paddles, use the one with the biggest gaps otherwise the bread can get stuck in it.

Judging the ‘raw’ mix ins, I thought I’d like Jeanes’s version the most. However, the syrup taste got lost and I ended up slightly favouring Jarrin’s over Nutt’s, but only very slightly. Incidentally, my combined version was to soak the bread like Jeanes and then put it under the grill for a few minutes, and I still personally think that was the best of all.