Week Twenty-Six: Foraged

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 really very recent times. At one historic village, we were guided by someone who had grown up there; he was younger than my father. My father describes his childhood in the 1950s as poor, but he lived in a flat with electricity and indoor plumbing, they had a TV and a radio. Our guide was living in a one bedroom thatched farmer cottage, literally the sort you’d see recreated in living history villages as ‘how people of the past lived’, in 1985. That’s not even forty years ago, probably within the lifetimes or close to it of people reading this. It will sound very privileged, I had no idea people in a developed western country were living like this in 1985.

Our guide also talked about the foods they had, more or less all foraged or farmed from the local surroundings, including carrageen moss, which is actually a seaweed not a moss (I also learned here that carraig in Irish is rock or rocky, which tells you a lot about where it’s found.) Ice cream makers will possibly be familiar with carrageen moss as the source of carrageenan powder, a commonly used stabiliser. I have some of the actual carrageen moss itself. Earlier in the holiday, I’d had carrageen moss pudding. It was very similar in texture to panna cotta or crème brûlée, both of which I’ve often thought could probably be ice creamed pretty well. In the spirit of carrageen moss pudding, I decided to make carrageen moss ice cream.

I’m more or less following the recipe on the carrageen moss I have combined with a recipe for carrageen moss pudding because the packet recipe makes no mention of sugar. The carrageen moss will gel with the water so I’m not relying on sugar to be solely holding the water here, but I am a sweet tooth and I do like sugar. Second of all, vanilla. The carrageen moss packet recipe doesn’t include any flavour beyond you can add some, but carrageen moss pudding is generally vanilla flavoured; I used half the amount I do for Gunter’s vanilla ice cream, so 0.81% of the total weight, and decided to simmer it in the milk rather than mash it up with the sugar. (Half because, as we’ll learn, so much weight is lost from this mixture.) This recipe will look weird, that’s because I tried to formulate it as an ice cream and it went very wrong, although we’ll return to that point later. It produces something like ice cream but it’s really a jelly that is churned and frozen. I’m afraid this isn’t one for freezer bowl users, it needs a compressor machine; that’s because there’s no time to cool it, it will just set. However, whilst you can make this using a compressor machine, I wouldn’t - I include the recipe here for curiosity sake, although I would be interested to see this in a Ninja Creami, I think there it would work well.

Carrageen moss ice cream

Ingredients

The recipe on the packet uses half a litre of milk so that’s what I did, but it’s probably suggest make double these amounts because a lot of it in lost and this didn’t give much ice cream. The carrageen moss and vanilla pod are in brackets because neither end up in the final ice cream so their amounts are based on the total that the milk, sugar and egg weigh.

531.93g Jersey whole milk (5% butterfat; if you can’t get Jersey whole milk, just use regular whole milk) (89.36%)

11.93g caster sugar (2%)

51.43g egg, yolk and white (8.64%) (This was one medium egg)

(10g carrageen moss, soaked in cold water for 10 minutes, 1.68%)

(4.82g vanilla pod, split and scraped, 0.8% - this was essentially one vanilla pod)

Method

1. Put the milk, vanilla pod including seeds and carrageen moss in a saucepan, set a timer for 18 minutes and gently boil; have the lid on the saucepan to limit water loss, although make sure you lift it to stir the milk every few minutes.

2. With about 12 minutes left on the timer, turn the machine on to pre-chill.

3. Once the timer has finished, put the egg and sugar in a bowl, and beat them together.

4. (This following steps need to be done very swiftly, until the mixture is in the machine) Strain the milk mixture through a sieve, making sure you push as much through as possible. (You could also pre-chill the bowl you’re straining into, I did although I don’t know how much it helped.)

5. Pour the egg/sugar mixture into the milk mixture, quickly whisking as you go to prevent the egg from cooking. Continue to whisk to form a smooth mixture.

6. Pour the mixture into the ice cream machine, and churn. 

7. It won’t form the soft serve texture that’s generally aimed for, so stop churning when the ice cream has gathered on the paddle and is no longer passing through it.

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

You’ll notice it isn’t in my usual cardboard containers - that’s because there wasn’t enough of it, which is why I’d suggest make more than I did. It freezes as a block of ice; of course it does, it has hardly any sugar, and the annoying thing is I knew that! I originally formulated it with much more sugar, but when that mixture went wrong I had enough milk and vanilla pods to do one more. I bet on the wrong horse in going to the carrageen moss pudding recipe, I should have tried my original formulation again but not let the egg crystallise in the sugar. The good news is I still have 40g of carrageen moss left, and can try this again. This is not going to become a staple of ice cream making for me, but I would like to get it right once.