Week Fourteen: Fooled you ;)

This was originally going to form its own, not-weekly-themed post, and already had the tentative title of ‘The Colour Beige’. But when I saw the theme for this week, it made me think about a sensory trick that can be played, and that was extremely related to this intended post, and so they became one.

As I look back at the photos of my ice creams so far, there is a lot of beige with one venture into brown for the chocolate, and I suppose the ostrich ice creams are more yellow (and in real life, the strawberry and peanut butter ice cream and the sherbet were a pinky colour, although that didn’t really come out in the pictures.) A lot of natural food products don’t really give strong colouring, and cream sometimes mixed with egg yolk will lend itself to creamy, beigey colours. But the Gunter’s confectioners did talk about colouring some of their ice creams, usually using something called cochineal to get reds for the strawberry and raspberry ice creams, and Nutt uses it in millefruit ice cream; cochineal is made from insects, I’d prefer to not use it, but there are other natural food dyes. Jeanes even had an albeit small section all about food colouring, although he was frustratingly vague. He directs the reader to the ‘vegetable colours’ made by M. Breton and obtainable from Mr Fevre in Marylebone Street, London; it is possible to find references to M. Breton’s vegetable colours, for example here, but the products themselves and Mr Fevre seem lost to time. The idea of using vegetable based dyes remains, however, and I actually turned to one of my favourite more modern ice cream resources: Hello My Name Is Ice Cream. 

As for the trick part of it, we associate certain colours with certain foods. Green is mint, pink is strawberry, obviously orange is orange (the colour is named after the fruit, by the way)… If someone handed you a purple ice cream, you’d expect it to be blueberry or blackcurrant, and you’d probably be surprised if it was vanilla or banana. The colour can be very powerful, presented with foods that are the ‘wrong’ colour people will misidentify the flavour, even if they recognise it, based on the colour it is. So people who eat a food that is green coloured but chocolate flavoured will struggle to identify the chocolate flavour because the colour is misleading them; some will go as far as saying it’s mint even though it obviously isn’t because the misleading colour is that powerful. Or at least that’s the theory.

So my whole thing this week was misleadingly coloured ice creams: I made two ice creams with distinctive flavours but coloured ‘wrongly’, and conducted an admittedly not very large experiment. I got my colleagues to try them both with their eyes open to begin with and see what flavour they think each ice cream is, then to try them again with their eyes covered. The hypothesis is there will be a wide range of flavour guesses in the eyes open section, but a majority of correct flavour identifications in the eyes covered section. We’ll see how that plays out later, but first, the ice creams…

This may be a disappointment, or maybe not: there are no new ice cream recipes this week. I wanted to make two ice creams with distinct but different tastes, and that I know are fairly plain in colouring. I have lots of flavours in my recipe catalogue but the new ones are a little more experimental, and I specifically wanted the flavour to be obvious otherwise the trick isn’t as well played. So I made orange sherbet which is purple and coffee ice cream which is pink. 

But I can talk about how I made the colourings. First, the purple. I tried Cree’s method of basically mushing blueberries that had been frozen and thawed through a sieve. It got me something more like a blueberry purée than a blueberry juice, and I’ll confess it did absolutely nothing to the colour of the orange sherbet. I will agree though, it also does nothing to the taste of it either. I ended up using food colouring - yes, I cheated. 

As for the pink, that’s beetroot. I had high hopes for this one because it had stained everything it had come into contact with. Beetroots aren’t the juiciest of vegetables, I got what I’d deem a beetroot mush by steaming the sliced beetroot for about forty minutes and then also pushing it through a sieve. I did try a juicer but it gave up, made the pieces smaller and then just stopped doing anything to them. I was really trusting Cree here that the flavour wouldn’t show up, because I hate beetroot, it just tastes like mud to me (and don’t ask how I know what mud tastes like.) I added two grams as she suggested, and I will say it did do something to the colour and I think if my ice cream has been white or paler it would have worked. Unfortunately, the egg yolks I’d had were surprisingly orange, much more so than their usual colour, and the beetroot had a colour to already battle against. So I helped this along with some colouring too, although not much. (And for those worrying, the beetroot flavour didn’t show up.)

So the actual colouring of the ice creams hadn’t been that successful, maybe the bug dye would have worked better? Although you could argue what I ended up doing was a lot closer to what Jeanes described - he wasn’t using random vegetables and fruits, he used prepared food colourings, albeit vegetable based rather than my ordered-from-Amazon-and-stuck-in-my-cupboard-for-years ones. But what about the sensory trick I was hoping to play, where the colour would confuse people on the flavour? Well, that was an abject disaster too; either my colleagues are very perceptive and intelligent (which seems unlikely to me) or they’ve become too suspicious of me to trust that anything is what it seems, but all of them guessed what both ice creams were even on seeing the colour, except one who thought the purple one was grape but continued to think it was grape even when he couldn’t see it so apparently orange just tastes like grape to him. 

You win some, you lose some. The ice creams were still delicious, they just didn’t work out as I’d hoped for April Fools. I’ve already got next week’s ice cream in the planning, let’s hope it’s more successful.