The Pineapple Encore

I’m just back from a fortnight in Ireland. I said, ages ago in  Irish week , that I would have liked to include some of my food experiences in Irish ice cream; well, fortunately they also fit in really well with this week’s theme of ‘Foraged’ although I will confess that, whilst the key ingredient here was foraged, I did not personally forage for it, mainly because I wouldn’t have known what I was looking for and would have had a good chance of poisoning myself. (My alternative idea for this week was blackberry, by the way, I even had this post written about it and everything. Maybe some other week!) I actually studied Irish history, but it was in the UK and the focus was on Anglo-Irish relations since the Tudor times. As there often is in the study of history, missing from it was any information about how ordinary people went about their lives. One of the really surprising things I learned whilst in Ireland and visiting historic sites was how rural parts of it remained until reall...

First of all, I will confess I had to cheat this one a little bit: I’ve gone away for a fortnight and would have been unable to make this ice cream fully within week twenty-five, so I churned it the day before and just photographed it during week twenty-five. And I’m going to have to pull out the stops to get week twenty-six done during its week too! When I think of summer, I think of feeling trapped inside my house because I neither want to get too hot nor encounter insects that may mean me harm. I like the theory of bees and have even visited a bee farm, but the reality is they scare me a bit because my buzz sensors go off and alert me that it could be a wasp before I see that it’s a bee. And, as I tell my cats, we don’t play with wasps (they don’t always listen to me…) From bees, I then, naturally, thought of honey.  Honey is a type of sugar; more accurately it’s made of sugars, mostly fructose with a little sucrose. I’ve written a little on different types of sugar before when ...

Sorbet has an even longer history than ice cream. The earliest forerunners of ice cream were essentially sorbets, in that they were ice mixed with a sweet flavouring. The first introduction of a dairy product was in China, sometime between 618 and 907; the discovery that salt mixed with ice helps lower the freezing point probably also came from China. This enabled ices to be frozen, rather than relying on naturally frozen ice. Ice cream didn’t enter Europe until about the 1500s, until then it was sorbet all the way. The Gunter’s confectioners called sorbets ‘water ices’. They generally had a very high crossover between each other, with most of their recipes being near enough identical, although Jeanes was the only one to give measurements beyond ‘a little’ and ‘enough to flavour’. I was thinking of making what they all call grape water ice but is really elderflower, mainly because I love elderflower as a flavour, but then I saw one of the unique water ice recipes: Jeanes had a recipe f...

(My autocorrect tried to turn the title into a racially offensive stereotype.) I spent quite a while deciding what to do for this week. Asian fusion isn’t something I have much experience with, it’s not a type of cuisine I eat, and I was having nothing inspire me. Then I was in the shower one evening and the thought just appeared, what if I replace the chilli in chocolate chilli with wasabi? I doubted this was a unique idea, and indeed it wasn’t - you can even buy wasabi flavoured chocolate from Lindt - but it also wasn’t overdone and it was the only idea I had so even if everyone and their grandma were making chocolate wasabi ice cream, I would have been making it too still. The chocolate part of this was easy, many weeks ago I made every Gunter’s chocolate ice cream recipe because they all had different recipes. Out of them, my preference was for Nutt’s recipe, so that’s the chocolate ice cream I’m going to use here. Deciding how much wasabi to use was the more difficult part. It’s n...

I’ve already made  plant based ice cream , so I decided to use dairy free week to do something slightly different which admittedly does not really meet the definition of ‘dairy free’. I’m going to be making lactose free ice cream. My dad is lactose intolerant, which means he’s never tried any of the ice creams I’ve made. I’ve inherited a lot of my dad’s ailments, including an allium intolerance (unless you have it, you have no idea how inconvenient this is!) along with general allergies and other things I won’t discuss on the internet with strangers. But fortunately for me, I don’t seem to have lactose intolerance - it’s recessive, as long as I inherited a good gene from my mum, I’m fine. That’s rare, on a worldwide scale; it’s estimated that around 65% of the worldwide population is lactose intolerant, although there are wide regional differences with a higher incidence rate than this amongst East Asian people - in some communities up to 100% - and around 10% of the UK population ...