Week Thirty-Seven: 80s/90s

I’ve never said how old I am, and I’m still not going to say exactly but I am a nineties kid. However, my memory for things in my childhood isn’t great (not because anything bad happened, I hasten to add! A lot of things just didn’t seem to register in my memory for some reason) and when those lists of ‘you’re a nineties kid if you remember these things’ go around, I very often remember none of them. I once joked with a friend that the TV show 3rd Rock From The Sun resonated with me, because it’s like I appeared on the planet with just enough memories to know I was around in the nineties but maybe my memory implanters didn’t realise they should be including TV programmes and popular toys? 

One of the few things I do remember are Frijj milkshakes. I can remember chocolate, strawberry and banana - the internet says there are more flavours now, but those are the three I remember. I don’t remember ever actually having one. My mum was well meaning, if I’d expressed an interest in having a Frijj milkshake she would have made me a far superior milkshake from scratch, but completely missed that the point was I wanted to share an experience with the other kids, who don’t forget I already didn’t really relate to thanks to my early education. So this week has been a bit of fun for me, I’ve finally had a Frijj milkshake (which is absolutely not the best bottled milkshake you can buy in a UK supermarket, by the way) and also made ice cream with them too!

Banana Frijj ice cream

Ingredients

400g banana Frijj milkshake (50%) (or use a different flavour, or replace with your preferred bottled milkshake)

280g double (50.5% butterfat) cream (35%)

120g caster sugar (15%)

Method

1. Whisk all ingredients together, I use a stand mixer.

2. Optional, allow to chill (it’s all cold ingredients and the flavour isn’t going to ‘infuse’ so it can be immediately churned; I left it for a couple of hours.)

3. If chilled, re-whisk just prior to churning.

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.

This was fun, easy, quick and really nice. It’s so soft, probably because the milkshake has stabilisers in it, and the flavour is so much better than my previous attempt at using banana in frozen dessert, where the banana mush texture somehow managed to transfer over. This has no mush, and it also tastes like banana sweets rather than banana. That sounds like a stupid statement, so I’ll explain: have you ever noticed that a banana flavoured sweet (candy to the Americans) tastes nothing like an actual banana? It’s because the banana flavourings that are still used were largely based on a banana variant called Gros Michel, which was the most exported banana up until the 1950s, when a fungal infection nearly wiped the species out. In the wake of that, the Cavendish banana became the dominant banana and is the type of banana readily available now, and all the Gros Michel leaves us is banana flavouring. There you go, I brought history into this modern ice cream!