Week Thirty-Six: 00s/10s

I hate salted caramel. I’m extremely sensitive to the taste of salt, to the extent that I usually just leave it out of things I’m cooking - I have very small hands and even I can’t get a pinch of salt small enough for me to not taste it and think that food is salty. So when all caramel seemed to turn to salted caramel practically overnight in the mid 2000s, that wasn’t the best move for my tastes. 

Salted caramel ice cream

Ingredients

This is at heart a vanilla custard base ice cream. I use a lot of vanilla, that’s because I’m still basing these recipes on Gunters recipes and they used a lot of vanilla. I made 800g of mixture.

480g single (19% butterfat) cream (60%)
40g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (5%)
8 egg yolks (15%, or 1 egg yolk per 100g of mixture being made)
160g caster sugar (20%)

[4 vanilla pods (1 vanilla pod per 200g of mixture being made)]

Salted caramel sauce - I bought a 200g jar and used it all, and yes I used a pre-made sauce because I’m an ice cream maker not a caramel sauce maker

Method

1. Cut the vanilla pods into small pieces and use the back of a spoon to press the pieces into the sugar, releasing the seeds in the process.

2. Add the creams, egg yolks and vanilla-sugar to a saucepan and whisk until a line can be drawn in the mixture on the back of a metal spoon.

3. Chill for several hours, preferably overnight; for best food safety use an ice bath to chill to 20C before putting it into the fridge.

4. Rewhisk just prior to churning and pass through a sieve to remove the vanilla pod pieces.

5. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions.

6. At the soft serve point, add the salted caramel sauce, then put the ice cream into a freezer safe container.

7. Freeze for at least four hours and preferably overnight.



First of all, if you’re wondering if it was still half unfrozen when it went into the freezer, yes it was; I’m not good at adding mix ins, and because I prefer smooth textures and single note flavours in ice cream, there’s not much motivating me to get better. This means I add things like warm (or at least not chilled) caramel sauce before I should have, and then can’t churn it more or the caramel pieces will be lost. I wasn’t expecting this to be any good so I wasn’t heartbroken if it froze badly … but it actually didn’t, the weird texture is just because it stuck to the lid. And surprisingly to me, it’s delicious. I do wish it wasn’t salted, but the vanilla and caramel blended almost perfectly and an ice cream I didn’t expect to like at all is possibly one of my favourite ones I’ve made.


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