The Pineapple Encore

We finish of our ice cream tour of the world in Oceania. I originally had an entirely different ice cream planned for this week, but the key ingredient got lost in the post and actually I’m not disappointed because I was trying to work out how to incorporate it into an ice cream, and in the end I got to do another fruit ice cream. I’ve been enjoying the fruits lately, helped by my local supermarket have a buy one get one free on a wide range of fruits so I’ve been making some ice creams I’d never thought about relatively cheaply, at least in homemade ice cream terms. Passionfruit was excellent, gooseberry less so. The nice thing about being an amateur ice cream maker is, I never knew it was meant to be difficult to add fruit to ice cream. I follow how the Gunters confectioners do it, namely using the juice/thin pulp of the fruit and adjusting the dairy to bring the water back down, and it works. As a nice bonus, the fruit recipes are no cook ones, which is much appreciated in the sligh...

This on-going theme of around the world is really showing up how little travelled I am… I’ve done a reasonable amount in Europe because I don’t have to fly to get there. I hate flying, or to be more specific I hate airports. I leave the UK roughly once every seven to nine years, and I’m fortunate that I live in a beautiful country with so much to explore that I never feel tired of being here. But it does mean I have little personal experience to build these ice creams from, so I’m relying on what I have. In the case of Africa, an amazing North African restaurant where I used to live.  So this is tagine ice cream, or more specially tagine inspired ice cream - I told a friend I was doing tagine ice cream and she said, “Would you stop trying to make savoury ice creams?” This isn’t savoury, it’s taking the sweet and spicy elements of a tagine. Specifically it’s apricot ice cream enhanced with cinnamon and saffron. We’ll start with the apricot ice cream: only one Gunter’s confectioner i...

I have taken inspiration from South America before, in  With A Twist . That was Brazil; this is Argentina. Dulce de leche, or sweet of milk, is a caramelised milk that is not restricted to Argentina but is very well embraced there and treated as a national food. The first encounter I had with dulce de leche was in an Argentine restaurant. There are multiple ways to make dulce de leche, some more authentic than others; I use a cheat method that uses condensed milk. This ice cream recipe is based on my normal dulce de leche recipe, modified to get to a state where it will churn as ice cream. We’ve seen that my home formulated recipes don’t always go wonderfully, but - spoiler alert - I’m actually pretty happy with this one, and would make only one albeit large modification. Dulce de leche ice cream Ingredients 397g condensed milk (36.19%) 550g whole (3.7% butterfat) milk (50.14%) 150g unsalted butter (13.67%) Method 1. Put the condensed milk in a saucepan and heat until it turns a l...

If modern ice cream was born in Italy before growing up in France, then America is where it found a home. There was ice cream in America before there was even a United States of America. There’s a whole style of ice cream that came to prominence in America - Philadelphia, or eggless, ice cream, so distinguished from the French custard style. Pretty much everything associate with ice cream now - floats, sundaes, cones - was either invented or popularised in America. Even ice cream at home is from America, thanks to home freezers and their growth in popularity post World War Two; freezers had already been invented, but whilst Europe recovered from the devastation of war, America was physically untouched (more or less) and turned their war economy to a luxury goods one. Whilst Britons were still under rations, Americans were buying home freezers and the frozen goods to go in it. This included ice cream. Ironically, given that the ice cream named in America is eggless, I’ll be making  ...