Week Forty: Fireside

My ice cream this week has become a running joke for my friends. I don’t have many personal associations with fireside, fireplaces and food, so instead I thought about fires in general and decided to make a smoky tea (ignore, as one of my friends pointed out, that fireplaces aren’t smoky unless you’re doing them wrong.) I did consider simply using liquid smoke but that’s not very in keeping with my historical theme for ice creams, so instead I decided to use a smoky tea - lapsang souchong - and also use the opportunity to sort out how to do tea ice creams with my new method. Having decided this, and here’s where I went wrong, I had my friends guess the flavour. Only one guessed it and that was more by luck, she alone managed to get to ‘a hot drink of some sort’ and using the cooler/hotter system of approving guesses she made it to tea and then lapsang souchong. She disagreed that it suits the theme of fireside, I explained my reasoning, and she said, “But no one says ‘bring the lapsang, I’ve got the fire going’ do they?” And now ‘bring the lapsang’ is a running joke, and it wouldn’t be so bad if a lot of the things I say didn’t end up as running jokes for my friends.

I have made tea ice cream before, way back in Chinese New Year week. The common difficulty is figuring out how exactly to make the tea water. It worked out then that the suggested amounts led to about 20% of the overall recipe being tea water, but how much tea makes this much water is tricky. You aren’t making a cup of tea, you want it to be a strong infusion; I used about 90g of loose tea leaves, just about covered them with boiling water (it’s black tea, you can use boiling water here) and ended up with getting on for twice the amount of tea water that I needed. 

Lapsang souchong ice cream

Ingredients

I made 800g of mixture

40g single (19% butterfat) cream (5%)
400g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (50%)
160g caster sugar (20%)
200g lapsang souchong tea water (25%) - made by just about covering loose lapsang souchong tea with boiling water and leaving it to infuse for 15 minutes, before straining the leaves out

Method

1. Add the creams and tea water to a mixing bowl and whisk whilst gradually adding the sugar.

2. Leave to chill/infuse for several hours, preferably overnight. 

3. Rewhisk just prior to churning.

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

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

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1dmUdszqbIxenVu8rqPmi1BWTFzuqElKI

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

Personally, I don’t like lapsang souchong as a tea; I like tea but the more delicate ones, I like white teas or light black teas like Darjeeling first flushes. Lapsang souchong, Russian caravan, gunpowder… They’re all a bit heavy for me. So personally, I was unlikely to ever like the flavour of this. But I can separate that from acknowledging it’s a good ice cream. Using tea to make ice cream works really well, and I see no reason the same method and recipe couldn’t be used for other water based infusions. And it certainly works well as a smoky ice cream. To sum up, I don’t like it but it is good.

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