Week Twenty-Three: Asian fusion

(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 not like there are recipes available for this, so I decided to look at recipes that had similar ingredients. Wasabi isn’t hot in the same way chilli is, I’ve tended to experience it in much the same way I do cinnamon, so I looked at cinnamon recipes. My trusted ice cream source Hello My Name Is Ice Cream used between a stick and a half and two sticks of cinnamon in a 1000g recipe; each stick is between half a tablespoon and a tablespoon of ground cinnamon. I didn’t want to not taste the wasabi but I also didn’t want to overwhelm and I do find wasabi hotter than cinnamon. I decided to use a tablespoon of wasabi. 

On the topic of wasabi, I am using fresh whole wasabi; it’s not quite £80 of citrons expensive (nowhere near) but it’s not the cheapest either. I felt using fresh wasabi was more in keeping with the Gunter’s confectioners, but to be honest if I want to make it again, I’ll probably use a shop bought wasabi paste which I know isn’t entirely wasabi and is largely horseradish, which to be fair is a flavour I like and when my allium intolerance is really flaring up I often use horseradish as a garlic replacement in cooking. In fact, as you’ll see in a minute, I think it might even be preferable to use wasabi paste.

Chocolate wasabi ice cream

There isn’t a new recipe exactly for this one, pick your favourite chocolate ice cream recipe and add 10.24% of the total weight of wasabi.

Whisk it in whilst forming the custard but definitely make sure you strain the mixture.

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1sbyo5R-RVOuBeyoJgktWXRC0x_D6YFCY
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1hlnNyWRWPHtNgpofNQyyzvt9yaPlIO0D

This one disappointed me but it’s honestly almost certainly my fault. Wasabi is a fussy ingredient, and I didn’t really know what I was doing with it. It pretty much got lost in the ice cream, with the only impact being a very mild earthy taste and a very grainy texture. But I do like the idea of it and with a bit more time to make the ice cream, I’m going to experiment with the amounts and methods because I really want to make this flavour work. I think wasabi paste might work better, being more concentrated. Once I’ve got it I’ll post an updated recipe.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week One: Basics

Image
On a reddit called  52 Weeks of Ice Cream , the aim is (unsurprisingly) to make 52 ice creams in 2024, following a weekly theme. As I’m essentially an ice cream tinkerer and newly armed with a fancy ice cream machine, this appealed greatly, and so here we are.  The first theme is ‘basics’ and what would be more basic than making what is literally my base ice cream? It only uses three ingredients (and two of those are variants of each other) and instructions that are essentially ‘weigh’ and ‘mix’. I made 600g but I do everything in ice cream by percentages, and I’ve given those too so you can make any amount you like. Ingredients: 340.2g single (19% fat) cream (56.7%) 139.2g whipping (39% fat) cream (23.2%) 120.6g caster sugar* (20.1%) * Caster sugar seems to be a UK thing; it’s very fine granulated sugar, different to powdered/confectioner’s/icing sugar in that it has nothing else added to it; granulated sugar will work instead, or could be ground down to make DIY caster sugar...
Read more

Week Eight: With a Twist

Image
I was initially not sure what to do for With a Twist week. The first thought was some form of drink/cocktail based ice cream, taking ‘with a twist’ as in ‘scotch on the rocks.’ But, I don’t drink, and none of the classic drinks that come with a twist (a twist being a small slice of fruit, usually citrus of some sort) had easy non-alcoholic versions; they tend to be very alcohol based, unlike something like a piña colada which essentially turns into a pineapple coconut milkshake. There was an excellent cocktail bar in Wrexham (yes, the city where Ryan Reynolds owns the football team) called Voodoo Moon that made the best virgin piña coladas, and everything really - I’m still sad it’s closed now. I digress. No cocktail based ice cream. So instead I looked at other uses of ‘ with a twist’, and landed on the Todd Rundgren album With A Twist, bossa nova style versions of his previous songs, and I thought yes. Brazil.  (I promise this becomes relevant in a minute.) We tend to think of ve...
Read more

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 ...
Read more