Week Twenty-Five: Summer

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 making parmesan ice cream. Dreamscoops has honey with a relative freezing point depression - basically, how soft it makes the ice cream - of 1.46, compared to the ‘standard’ 1 of sucrose (they don’t actually say where they got these values, though); mathematically, it works out that if you use about two thirds of the amount of honey as sugar, it should give the same result. Mathematically, anyway. It doesn’t and I think I know why, I’ll expand in a minute. But first, the recipe I used.

Honey ice cream

Ingredients

457.6g single (19% butterfat) cream (67.81%)

120.38g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (17.84%)

96.84g honey (14.35%)

Method

1. Put all ingredients into a saucepan

2. Gently heat whilst constantly whisking, until all of the honey is properly combined and no lumps remain

3. Chill for several hours, preferably overnight; for best food safety, use an ice bath to reduce the mixture to 20C before refrigerating

4. Whisk again and pass through a sieve

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

7. Put into a container and freeze for at least four hours, preferably overnight

(I usually put photos here; I don’t have enough internet signal for them to attach, so here’s a direct link to them on Instagram instead: https://www.instagram.com/p/C8h9o3NM9bU/?igsh=MXIwOGN2dWhhZDhkdA==)

First of all, the good news is this tastes really nice and is worth working on … which brings me to the bad: it’s really crumbly. And I think the reason why becomes clear when looking at the first numerical column on Dreamscoops and when I put this recipe through my calculator. Honey isn’t entirely sugar, there’s a lot of water in it, about 25% (although if you look at what it did to my spoon, you’d be fooled into thinking it’s all solid…) So I actually ended up with less than two thirds of the sugar. Add to this, there’s a lot more water in this recipe than my usual amount, nearly 10% more; this is both because of the water in the honey and, with less overall mass, of the water in the creams taking up comparatively more of it. Honey might be more efficient at holding the water being mostly monosaccharides, but there’s less of it and more water to try and hold - it just can’t do it. I have two ideas on how to fix it, and I’ve bought more honey to try it with and shall update you on how it goes. The first one is to work out how much honey would be needed to get two thirds of the amount of sugar, and the second is just based on a hunch that if I replace the sugar with honey on a 1:1 basis, the increase in water will be cancelled out by the increase in softness. At the very least, one of these will be closer to enable further refinements.