Week Thirty-Four: Spices

This ice cream was mainly inspired by the bottle of saffron I have that I am almost certainly never going to use in anything ever again. I bought it for Africa week and I’ve heard it said that saffron is a sweet and almost floral taste, but I couldn’t really pick that up amongst the other flavours of tagine inspired ice cream, so this week I decided to use only saffron. 

Saffron ice cream

Ingredients

I made 700g, mostly because I was concerned about how much saffron I had, but the percentages can make any amount.

385g single (19% butterfat) cream (55%)
175g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (25%)
140g caster sugar (20%)

Saffron threads - I used roughly 15 (they’re fiddly to count exactly!) per 100g of mixture, but this easily varies according to your taste.

Method

1. Put all ingredients into a saucepan and whisk together; you don’t need to boil it, it’s just to encourage the flavour out of the saffron

2. Leave mixture to chill for several hours, preferably overnight; for best food safety, use an ice bath to chill to 20C before putting it in the fridge

3. Rewhisk just prior to churning and strain the saffron threads out 

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

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

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1FPC1lOHUJM6m0fIqfm4zLA1JDOwASFFy

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1syEluyRjXAZ6_MsoP6lyGMk7JbYh5ivq

This is interesting. That isn’t to say bad - it’s a very complex flavour and I don’t know if floral is the right word but I can see where it’s coming from. You taste it and the flavour changes the more you eat. I think it needs something with it, even if just only in the background - I could see it going with something like orange, in fact I might try that one day. The colour is impressive too!

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