Homemade Marshmallow Creme

Sticky, fluffy marshmallow creme — sometimes dubbed marshmallow topping or "cream" — can be whipped together in less time than it takes to make a decent cup of hot chocolate. And then, hey, boom, spike that drink with a little whiskey or something stronger and you've got something to put on top of it.

We've discussed real marshmallow syrup before, using actual and esoteric marshmallow plant, but spooning globs of this fake stuff onto hot chocolate, ice cream, milkshakes, or Sundaes is a lot more familiar to...well, nearly everyone.  Legions of American children grew up eating fluffernutter sandwiches, a combination of peanut butter and marshmallow creme, in their school lunches. Some home cooks deploy it as a binder in puffed rice squares and popcorn balls, to add bulk and sweetness in sauces and fudge, and as the base for cake frostings and whoopie pies.

Here's what most home cooks don't do, though: make it themselves and change the base flavor. Vanilla extract is the common flavoring, but why not use mint extract, rosewater, or orange flower water? Pomegranate molasses adds a bit of color and a pleasant bitter note to the sweetness of the glossy white confection. And don't forget liquor: bourbon, absinthe, apple brandy, and dark rums are just the beginning. Admittedly, absinthe-flavored marshmallow creme may have limited uses, but that cup of hot chocolate is a good place to start.

This marshmallow topping can be cobbled together from just a few ingredients common to both bartenders and moms; syrup, egg whites, confectioners' sugar, a pinch of salt, and some kind of flavoring. If you happen to be making ice cream, you may well have those egg whites on hand already. Some confectioners cook a syrup that's a mix of sugar, water, corn syrup, and cream of tartar. You could tie your shoes with gloves on, too, but why make this harder than it needs to be? Let's drop any pretense of this being at all healthy and use straight corn syrup. See below for notes on flavorings.

Homemade Marshmallow Creme 

2 egg whites
1 cup corn syrup (310g)
1 cup confectioners'/powdered/10x sugar (110g)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or other flavoring: see note below)
a knifepoint of salt — no more than 1/8 tsp

In an electric stand mixer (such as a KitchenAid) beat the egg whites and corn syrup with the ballon ship attatchment for a few minutes until the mixture is stiff and white. Stop the mixer. 

Add the powdered sugar in three stages. Add the first third, turn the mixer on low, then increase gradually to the highest speed until all the sugar is incorporated. Turn off the mixer. Add the second third of sugar and repeat until all the sugar is fully incorporated and the mixture is solid white, glossy, and thick enough to hold thick ribbons that plop off a spoon or spatula.

Add vanilla (or other flavoring) and salt and mix until well blended. Transfer to a one-quart container and store covered in the refridgerator; it will keep for up to three days.

A note on flavorings: A half to a full ounce (1-2 tablespoons) of most spirits should suffice (unless they are strongly flavored — use your judgement), a teaspoon of most baking extracts or cocktail bitters, and just a few drops for strong essential oils such as mint or neroli.

Goes well with:

• Chartreuse Hot Chocolate. When you don't feel like mucking about with flavorings and just want to dollop flops of this stuff on hot cocoa, why not this stuff?
• Smith & Cross pot-still rum-flavored marshmallows. Because they're easier to make than you think they are.
• Still on a marshmallow kick? Try a boozy marshmallow collins (no, not with this stuff — with real marshmallow syrup).
• Want more candy recipes? Try three variations of the classic Philadelphia springtime candy, Irish Potatoes (note: most Irish Potato recipes lack actual potatoes).

Bad Design is Everywhere, Even Cookbooks

You know, I hear they was really tiny guys.

~  Napoleon Bonapart (Ian Holm)

Time Bandits

Lebanese rice; once you find it, it's not there

This morning, I had to break out an old dome magnifier to read the tiny font on Salma Hage's The Lebanese Kitchen (Phaidon, 2012). Partly this is my middle-aged eyes needing a boost to read, but partly it's just ridiculously tiny font. How tiny? That "a" in "Lebanese rice" on the photo of the book's index is 1 millimeter high — about a 3-point font for you designers. To put it in perspective, that's smaller than a single, tiny coriander seed. Maybe the small font is a diversion from lax indexing (Lebanese rice is actually on page 332, not 334 as indicated).

Lilliputian font wouldn't be an issue on a tablet like the iPad or its competitors. Reading on a tablet can be a great experience for so many reasons. A mundane point I particularly like is the ability to change font size as desired; quite literally, font size there is as arbitrary as it is irrelevant. Too small? Make it big. Too big? Make it small. Don't like that font? Change it to another style entirely. But books — printed books — are ancient technology; one cannot double-tap the page to bring up a definition or shrink the image by squeezing together thumb and forefinger. Once it's printed, it's printed and there's no changing it. One does not simply make the font bigger or re-flow the copy on a printed page; it's locked.

Kona Stout Ice Cream ingredients

Jeni Britton Bauer's editing and design team, you're all culpable here, too. The content of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home (Artisan 2011) is fine, but its design is among the worst of otherwise serious contemporary cookbooks in my collection. The light hues of blue, green, tangerine, purple, and pink of the ingredient lists bleed into light backgrounds. Cute? Arguably. It's clean and light, almost hygienically precise — weighty subliminal elements when dealing with dairy. More to the point, those ingredient lists are all but illegible compared to larger, darker words on the same page. The subtext here is that ice cream doesn't matter; stories about ice cream do. Before I thought to use the dome magnifier on this one as well, I had to take a picture of a recipe with my smart phone, access the photo on my iPad's photo stream, use a photo editing app to sharpen the photo, increase the contrast, and enlarge it right up to the point where the letters started to pixilate — then back off a hair — simply so I could read each one. Understand: I've never had to do with with another book and I really like ice cream.

A plea, then, for book designers and publishers; if something is worth putting in the book, it's worth doing it right. Not everyone has fancy glass magnifying domes or the gimlet eyes of a 23-year old designer. Don't give the mechanics such short shrift; make indicies, instructions, and ingredients lists as legible as head notes, introductions, and forewords.

Goes well with:

• Know who has a great index? C. Anne Wilson in her distilling history, Water of Life.
• The dome magnifier above came with my copy of The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Decent models can be found online for under $50. Here's a sampling. 
• Speaking of short shrift and completely off-topic: one of the best lines about ugly kids remains "I was so ugly as a child that my parents put me in dark corner and fed me with a slingshot." 

Jesus Juice Sorbet

For decades, Spaniards have indulged in iced calimocha, a simple drink that is about as easy as an on-the-go drinker could want: equal parts red wine and Coca Cola. Nobody is about to win any bartending awards with this thing, but what it lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in tastiness — sweet, slightly bitter, and about 7% alcohol, but it's easy to take along to the beach, a picnic, or a fútbol game.

The drink is not unique to Spain and it travels under a number of names wherever one finds wine and soda. American wine coolers, for instance, clearly are in the same family. In fact, if you think of it as a sort of bare-bones, stripped-down, single-chromosome sangria, calimocha's flexibility becomes manifest.

Jake Godby and Sean Vahey, founders of Humphrey Slocombe ice cream shop in San Francisco, seem to have recognized this and have given the wine-and-cola combo a Neverland twist as a sorbet. "Michael Jackson died suddenly on the afternoon of Thursday, June 25, 2009," they write in Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream Book. "Before his corpse was cold and the Botox wore off, we were working on a new flavor to pay tribute to the fallen icon." Jesus Juice — reports vary on the variety of wine and how, precisely, soda was incorporated — was Jackson's name for the concoction of wine and soda he favored around the ranch.

For the end of summer when nights are cool enough for blankets, but the days are hot as blazes, here's Godby and Vahey's recipe for Jesus Juice sorbet. The duo caution, however, that it may cause inappropriate touching.

Jesus Juice Sorbet

1 cup sugar 
1 cup water 
1 cinnamon stick 
2 cups cola [Mexican Coke]
1 cup good-quality dry red wine 
2 Tbl red wine vinegar 
1 tsp salt  

In a large, heavy-bottomed, nonreactive saucepan over medium heat, combine the sugar and water and stir to dissolve the sugar. Drop in the cinnamon stick and bring to a boil over medium-high heat.

Stir in the cola, wine, vinegar, and salt and remove from the heat. Let cool completely, then cover the bowl tightly and chill in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour or preferably overnight. When you are ready to freeze the mixture, take out the cinnamon stick, transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker, and spin according to the manufacturer's instructions. Finish freezing in freezer. Stare approvingly at the Man in the Mirror. Eat immediately, or transfer to an airtight container, cover, and freeze for up to 1 week.

Jake Godby and Sean Vahey (2012)
Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream Book
144 pages (paperback)
Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452104689
$19.95

Goes well with:

• Gift of the Negi. Wine-and-cola is not unlike the 19th-century port wine concoction known as the Negus. Recipes here include one for children's parties from Isabella Beeton (Jackson would approve, I'm sure), a 38-gallon Negus made for England's King George IV, and (no surprise) an effervescing Negus made with soda water. Some things never get old...

Miniature Ice Cream Sandwiches

Eighteenth-century lexicographer, biographer, and essayist Samuel Johnson wrote in the first edition of his pithy Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that oats are "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people." It's a quote that still raises the ire of some Scots. Of course, Dr. Johnson could also be a bit of a prick about many things, not just English ethnocentrism. He defined a distiller, for instance, as "One who makes and sells pernicious and inflammatory spirits." That's clearly hogwash. Grains of salt — many of them — are required when reading his essays.

But Johnson was in mind on a recent trip to visit my parents when my mother picked up a small tub of tiny oatmeal cookies, each the size of a medium coin, from Trader Joe's. Opinionated as Johnson may have been, was not entirely wrong about oats. Oatmeal is fine in a mash bill for, say, dark and velvet stouts, but the grain doesn't make one of my favorite cookies because it tends to yield a dry little cake. Not horrible, just not something I'd shove others out of the way to get.

So in an offhand, joking way, I told Mom "You know, if you want to keep your granddaughter busy, you could have her make little ice cream sandwiches with those tiny cookies. Maybe a teaspoon of vanilla ice cream between two of them, then freeze them." The Midwest summer was soul-draining hot; ice cream sounded great, but the tedium of little handwork required to make them was not something seriously to be entertained. This was just idle chatter; holding an idea up to the light, as it were, and casting it aside without further thought.

When I went to get ice for my iced tea the next morning, lo and behold — a one-gallon bag of miniature ice cream sandwiches was waiting in the freezer. Mom had been busy after I'd gone to sleep. We had them that night for dessert as we sat around the big wooden dining room table, talking politics, religion, and other topics one doesn't broach with casual acquaintances.

Some ideas, it seems, should not be cast aside so lightly. 

Goes well with:

• No need to restrict yourself to vanilla ice cream (or oatmeal cookies). We've made these with goat cheese ice cream (or, rather Glace au Fromage-blanc de Chèvre) that turned out quite good as did the Dutch cocoa ice "cream" made with thick coconut milk rather than cream. Lemon ice cream sandwiched between Belgian speculoos cookies are winners, too. Take this as a template and run with it. Hell, you can dip them in chocolate if you like. 
• Agnes B. Marshall was a bit of a maverick in her (Victorian) day. in 1901, she advocated mixing liquid oxygen with ice cream ingredients tableside to make ice cream, getting a jump on modernist cooks by almost a century. See Mrs. Marshall's Liquid Air Ice Cream.
• In her book Paletas, Fany Gerson gives a recipe for granizado de michelada, a granita-like frozen treat based on that Mexican spiked beer stalwart, the michelada. Here is the recipe.
• About this time last year, San Diego lost power for a day. Rum-lashed mango sorbet inspired by David Lebovitz helped get us through the dark, sultry night. Lebovitz called for dark rum, but I swapped it out with maraschino, then used rum over the top of the finished sorbet. You try it.

Granizado de Michelada

A discussion arose yesterday among colleagues over what, exactly, a michelada is. Everyone acknowledged that it was Mexican, but after that, there was some...confusion. Despite the protean ingredient list one finds in bars from El Paso to Tijuana, a michelada is a simply cold beer that’s been hacked.

The embellishments of a michelada may be as straightforward as a squeeze of lime and dash of salt or may involve more complex iterations involving chile, Worcesterchire sauce (called salsa inglesa or "English sauce" in the Mexican idiom), Maggi seasoning, tomato juice, Clamato, shrimp, etc.

In the same way that something as straightforward as iced tea morphs from a sweet North Carolina specimen to a passion fruit-laced California example (or a bloody mary changes between bartenders), a michelada in Veracruz will not be the same as one in La Paz — or Dallas. With little effort, one may drift from the safe and familiar harbor of, say, a Corona-and-lime into more exciting territory of drinks a lot like seafood cocktails.

Add to this mix Fany Gerson’s granizado de michelada, a frozen concoction more akin to an Italian granita than a San Antonio thirst-quencher. Gerson, author of My Sweet Mexico, has written a complementary book called Paletas about Mexican ice pops, shaved ices, and aguas frescas. It’s a cool little book and, despite the obvious appeal to parents with young kids, bartenders and cocktail types would do well to crack it open; more than a few of the recipes include sugar, water, and spirits — the very definition of a classic cocktail. Well, minus the bitters.

Gerson’s main topic — the paleta — is a typically Mexican popcicle. You’ll find easily approachable ones everywhere, flavored with strawberry, tamarind, mango, or coconut. But you won’t have to scratch around long in Mexico to find varieties with corn, hibiscus flowers, berries, melon, rice, chiles, chamoy, and more.

In addition to lime-and-chia, rice pudding, strawberry-and-horchata, coconut, lime pie (with crushed graham crackers pressed into its surface), avocado, grapefruit, watermelon, and other kid-friendly flavors, frozen alcohol-spiked varieties in the book include:

• Paletas de crema y cereza con tequila (pops with sour cream, cherry, and tequila)
• Paletas de sangrita (with a tequila-laced spicy tomato base)
• Paletas de donaji (mezcal-orange ice pops)
• Paletas de platano rostizado (roasted bananas with rum)
• Paletas de rompope (rum- or brandy-spiked egg nog)

For my friends in Pennsylvania who may not have ready access to such things, here’s Gerson on her frozen michelada:

Micheladas, often called cheladas, are drinks made with beer, fresh lime juice, and sometimes chile. Micheladas especiales, or cubanas, use the same foundation but add Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and Maggy sauce, a popular seasoning that has a salty, caramelized, deep flavor. This raspado is inspired by these popular beverages.

Granizado de Michelada
(beer with chile granita)
SERVES 4 TO 6

2 small piquin or arbol chiles
3 cups water
½ cup sugar
Zest and juice of 3 limes, plus juice for wetting the rim
¼ cup chile powder
½ tsp salt
2 cups cold medium-dark beer

Combine the chiles, water, sugar, and lime zest in a saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Let cool to room temperature, then stir in the lime juice. Strain through a fine-mesh sieve. Pour the mixture into a shallow nonreactive pan and put it in the freezer.

Once the edges start to freeze (about 1 hour), scrape lightly with a fork, bringing the ice crystals from the edges to the center. Return to the freezer and continue scraping every 30 minutes or so, until the mixture is completely frozen and looks like small ice flakes.

Place the chile powder and salt in a bowl and stir. Wet the rim of a glass with lime juice, then dip it in the chile powder. For each serving, place ½ cup of the granita in the prepared glass. Pour about ¼ cup beer over the granita and serve immediately.

Note: It's always best to serve granita as soon as it's ready. But if you leave it in the freezer and it hardens, simply take it out of the freezer, let it soften for 5 to 10 minutes, and then scrape it with a fork again.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to slip off to get some chamoy for tonight's round of mangoadas.

Fany Gerson (2011)
Paletas: Authentic Recipes for Mexican Ice Pops, Shaved Ice & Aguas Frescas
128 pages (hardback)
Ten Speed Press
ISBN: 1607740354
$16.99

Goes well with:

• My take on Gerson’s previous book, My Sweet Mexico
• The Tex-Mex Cookbooks of Robb Walsh, including his recipe for a more traditional michelada

Rum-Fueled Blackout

Earlier this month, San Diego lost electricity when a power line from Arizona failed, leaving almost 5 million people without power. Normally, my neighbors are calm, quiet types, but when the flow of electricity just stopped that afternoon, their hooting and hollering sounded as if someone had tossed bags of wolverines and bees in their living rooms.

Rumors were rife and nobody seemed to know exactly what had happened. We weren’t sure how long we’d be without power, so we loaded bags of ice in the freezer and avoided opening the refrigerator to eek out as much residual cold as possible.

Hours later and still with no power, we realized that some frozen foods might not make it, so we decided to break out the most ephemeral food in there: a mango/maraschino sorbet.

I’d lifted the recipe almost verbatim from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop, except that I swapped out the dark rum he called for with slightly larger dose of lower-proof maraschino liqueur. Maraschino — not to be confused with the lurid red maraschino cherries one finds on ice cream sundaes, fruitcakes, and certain Manhattan cocktails — is a clear, aged liqueur made from Marasca cherries. It has an old-world affinity for fruit salads, so mango seemed a good fit.

It was.

But we didn’t forget Lebovitz’s original call for rum, so I hauled out a bottle of Coruba, a dark Jamaican rum, for drizzling over the sorbet in our candle-lit living room. I drizzled — at most — a tablespoon over the softening deep yellow sorbet.

The boys had other ideas. They turned their small bowls into drinking vessels by sloshing in several ounces of rum over their scoops. We each squeezed lime over what we had. I had lime-rum sauce on my maraschino/mango sorbet; they had slushy maraschino/mango daiquiris.

Everyone went to bed happy.

Mango-Maraschino Sorbet

2 fat, ripe mangoes (2 pounds, just shy of l kg)
2/3 cup/130 g sugar
2/3 cup/160 ml water
½ oz fresh lime juice
½-1 oz maraschino liqueur
Pinch of salt

Peel the mangoes and cut the flesh away from the pit. Cut the flesh into chunks and put them in a blender with the sugar, water, lime juice, maraschino, and salt. Squeeze the mango pits hard over the blender to extract as much of the pulp and juice as possible. Puree the mixture until smooth. Taste and adjust lime juice or maraschino.

Chill the mixture thoroughly, then freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Goes well with:

• For the maraschino, I used Luxardo brand. Maraska is another good choice.The former, wrapped in straw, is easier to find, but online merchants sell both if you don't come up with either in your local stores. 
• Blackouts aren't the only thing to cause us to drink in SoCal. Earthquakes do, too.

I Blew the Ass out of My Jeans This Week

A little extra weight

Would never

Look no nicer

On nobody else

But you.

~ Violent Femmes

It is a lie that nothing tastes as good as thin feels, but consider this: I blew the ass out of my jeans this week.

When we moved to San Diego in 2006, I had a tan line and weighed 86 kilos. Five years later, the tan is gone and I tip the scales at 104 kilos. For those more accustomed to pounds and ounces, that rounds out to around two and a half new ounces each week for the last 5 years.

Cringed when I saw this printed in the local paper

The result? 230 pounds of Rowley.

Whether you think in grams or pounds, there’s no denying: I’ve grown obese.

As an adult, I’ve never been particularly concerned about my actual weight. For better or worse, I’ve always been able to define my own space in a crowd. Standing 6’ tall with size 12 shoes and broad shoulders, I can pull off 210 muscled pounds and feel confident enough to peel off a shirt while working in the yard. But let that muscle atrophy and the fat balloon? It’s no wonder my pants couldn’t take the strain.

Since childhood, I’ve wavered between husky, thick, muscled, and, occasionally, flat-out fat. My father, on seeing me for the first time in a year, recently remarked, “Looks like you’re not missing any meals.” It’s true. I’d tapered off going to the gym in 2009 and, sometime in the last year, just stopped altogether. I did not, however, stop eating like someone who worked out regularly.

In addition, work has kept me increasingly tethered to computers — and chairs. With the onset of a sedentary life, the tan faded. My waistline inched up. That San Diego is extremely casual and few meetings call for suits or ties let me easily overlook the fact that several of my suit jackets no longer close and my old shirts won’t button at the neck.

Drinking hasn’t helped. Unless it’s for work, I don’t drink alcohol during workdays. But the fact is, I write about and for distilleries and their products. Sampling spirits and cocktails at distilleries and bars is what I do. Even on an off night at home, my preference for tiki drinks — pumped with fruit juices and syrups of passion fruit, ginger, cinnamon, vanilla, almonds, pomegranates, and more exotic tastes — means that I consume an enormous quantity of calories in cocktails alone. Lately, I've reverted to my old habit of after-dinner whiskey. Just whiskey.



I am tired of being fat; of snoring at night because the flesh of my neck now interferes with normal breathing; of getting winded after running up stairs; of rotating through the same four pants because only they fit; of catching despondent looks from my family who clearly worry about my health and whether I’m going to be around in five years, much less 20 or 30.

So. Spring cleaning, physical and mental.

With a deep and resigned sigh, I cleared the fridge of most of the syrups, poured them down the drain, and dropped the bottles into the recycling bin. No more homemade raspberry, black pepper, marshmallow, or chocolate syrups. Threw out my beautiful golden schmaltz and the blessed bacon fat. Tossed the homemade ice creams and 86’d the frozen coffee cake.

Because the intense California sun can cause irreparable skin damage, I got a skin cancer screening this morning (all clear) and renewed my membership at 24 Hour Fitness. Tuned up my bike. Shaved off my beard (although skinny guys can have — and look great in — beards, it’s far too common for us fat bastards to hide our spreading jowls behind fur).

There are very few things that give me such unbridled pleasure as good food in good company and I dread — absolutely dread — the cooking I’ll be doing in 2011. But I do want to be around to see the end of the year. And of 2012. And of every year after for as long as I can.

Say hello if you see me at the gym. But please don’t laugh if I blow the ass out of my shorts; I’m working on it.

Mrs. Marshall's Liquid Air Ice Cream

Known as Mrs. Marshall to her tens of thousands of students, readers, and customers, Agnes B. Marshall is nearly forgotten these days. What a loss. In her heyday, the Victorian food maven was as much a household name as Anthony Bourdain, Julia Child, or — God help us — Guy Fieri is today.

An even more apt comparison might be Martha Stewart. Like Stewart, Mrs. Marshall opened an umbrella of business ventures — and seems to have excelled in them all. She ran a cookery school in London; sold fancy cookware; hawked a variety of compounds, essences, and syrups under her own label; and generally championed wholesome cookery in an era when toxically adulterated food was commonplace. She published two early books on ices (that is, ice creams, water ices, sorbets, bombes, etc.) and is known to have published recipes for making and using ice cream cones almost two decades before their supposed invention at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. [1]

Generations before today’s molecular gastonomists began deconstructing S’mores, lashing cocktails with smoked foam, and otherwise digging into the science of how food does what it does, she also seems to have been the first person to advocate mixing liquid air with ice cream ingredients to make nearly instant ice cream.

Persons scientifically inclined may perhaps like to amuse and instruct their friends as well as feed them when they invite them to the house. By the aid of liquid oxygen, for example each guest at a dinner party may make his or her own ice cream at the table by simply stirring with a spoon the ingredients of ice cream to which a few drops of liquid air has been added by the servant.

~ Mrs. Agnes B. Marshall

The Table (24 August, 1901)

Turns out that the recipe doesn’t quite work (more than “a few drops” is necessary to make ice cream at the table), but the idea was solid and — in absence of servants — has been reproduced in high school chemistry labs around the United States for decades. It’s exactly the sort of scientifically inspired experimentation that supposedly avant garde molecular gastronomists and molecular mixologists [2] are using to thrill and delight their customers in 2010.

In an essay included in a 1998 reprint of Marshall’s Book of Ices [2], Peter Barham conjectures that Marshall thought of table-made ice cream after seeing or hearing about the public lectures of chemist Sir James Dewar. Dewar was the first to liquefy nitrogen. As the 19th century drew to a close, he’d gotten better at producing it in quantities — though “liquid air” was still a rare curiosity by the time Marshall wrote about it. Dewar nonetheless made a series of popular demonstrations about the new substance. While the rest of his audiences may have been mesmerized by the white “fog” generated when liquid nitrogen is poured into water, Barham surmises that Marshall took inspiration in the frozen water left in the bowl. The Queen of Ice Cream had found a new subject.

Liquid air isn’t new. Nor is ice cream. Turns out that molecular gastronomy isn’t either. But they’re all worth digging into a little more.

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm starting with the ice cream.

Notes

[1] Although wafers of various kinds have been made for centuries, ice cream vendors have been stuffing them with the cold stuff for more than 200 years, so they weren’t exactly new to Mrs. Marshall — but she did help popularize them. See Robin [credited as "Robert J."] Weir’s Essay An 1807 Ice Cream Cone: Discovery and Evidence.

[2] Robin Weir (ed) (1998) Mrs. Marshall: The Greatest Victorian Ice Cream Maker. With a Facsimile of The Book of Ices 1885. Syon House, Otley, W. Yorkshire.

[3] Their term. Not mine. See Darcy O’Neil’s An Introduction to Molecular Mixology for a straightforward discussion of molecular mixology at Art of Drink.

Goat Cheese Ice Cream

I don’t eat strange food just for the hell of it or to geek out and lord over those with mere plebian tastes. “Oh, pish. Baby camel with a kala jeera gastrique topped with a smoked apricot foam? How very last month.” No, those guys are buffoons. I sometimes eat unusual and off-the-wall foods because they taste great. Or they might. Or I’m being polite to my hosts.

Cheese ice cream falls into the first category — or, at least, some of it does. My friend Chef Fritz Blank gave me a recipe for a fresh goat cheese ice cream back in the 90’s. Now, just hush before you spout off that it’s the nastiest thing you’ve ever heard of. You and I both know that’s not true.

Chef Fritz Blank

Though mild cheeses such as ricotta and mascarpone make subtle improvements to plain ices, goat cheese ratchets up the funk just a little bit — with great results. It's not even exotic any more. Local producers from Georgia to California make outstanding goat cheeses, but even in Kansas supermarkets, tubes of fresh chèvre are commonplace. If you want to get even funkier than goat, consider something like David Lebovitz’s Pear-Pecorino Ice Cream or Helado de Roquefort from Anya von Bremzen’s The New Spanish Table.

Faced with von Bremzen’s Roquefort ice cream, goat cheese seems downright pedestrian. Oh, but it’s not. Its flavors come in three distinct waves; at first, it seems like especially good vanilla ice cream, but as it warms in your mouth, it becomes something like rich, complex New York style cheesecake. Swallow and there’s a light but distinct goaty aftertaste. I love it.

Blank’s recipe is meant for a professional kitchen, so when I make it at home, I scale it down for a more manageable recipe that yields a little less than a quart. The scaled down version follows.

Goat Cheese Ice Cream
(Glace au Fromage-blanc de Chèvre)

550ml (about 19 oz) heavy cream*
160ml (about 5.5 oz) half-and-half*
4 egg yolks
170g (¾ cup) sugar
250g (about 4 oz) fresh white goat cheese
1 tsp vanilla extract

Heat the heavy cream and half-and-half in a stainless steel saucepan over medium heat without stirring. Look for small bubbles to form around the rim of the pan. As soon as a light film covers the surface of the mixture, remove the pan from the heat and set aside to cool.

Meanwhile, place the egg yolks, sugar, fresh goat cheese, and vanilla extract in a food processor and blend until smooth.

Stir the scalded cream into the goat cheese mixture, mix thoroughly, and chill.

Freeze according to manufacturer’s instructions.

Blank notes that a few drops of syrup “made from balsamic vinegar reduced with raisins and dribbled over the top of each serving produces a memorable Sundae.” We've been known to top it with hot fudge sauce.

* A few words on the ingredients:

Half-and-half is, nominally, half cream and half milk in the United States. But that ain’t necessarily so. As Anne Mendelson explains in Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, it is a “term with no uniform meaning.” Practically, it refers to a light, creamy liquid with 10.5-18% milkfat, depending on the state and manufacturer. Richer than milk, not as rich as heavy cream. Since light cream can range from 18-30% milkfat, there may be some overlap between it and half-and-half. Experiment and substitute at your peril/discretion.

Heavy cream contains at least 36% milkfat, though, according to Mendelson, anything richer is rare.

Goes well with:

• Ask Chef Fritz, a sporadically updated message board in which Blank, a former microbiologist and Army captain, fields culinary questions.
• Anya von Bremzen (2005) The New Spanish Table. Workman Publishing, New York.
• David Leibovitz (2007) The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley.
• Anne Mendelson (2008) Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages. Knopf, New York.

Dreams of Salt and Honey

Salt, honey, Guinness, and chocolate

For decades, I’ve bought ice cream books: professional catalogs, technical manuals, and amateur how-to books from the 19th century, 20th century, and the latest offerings that cater to America’s increased love of bold flavors. They inform what goes on my table both at home and when I'm on the road. From cider ices in New England and cinnamon gelato in Amsterdam to Midwestern frozen custards laced with chunks of cherry pie, I've eaten my share of ice creams. Last week, I hit Scoops ice cream shop in Los Angeles. Their salt and honey ice cream is one of the best I’ve had in years.

Scoops has a few standard ice cream flavors in the case such as brown bread, but on any given day, you may also find Jim Beam and ricotta, Guinness and chocolate, white chocolate and Oreo, avocado and banana, pistachio and jasmine, and the straightforward Earl Grey.

Click to enlarge

A white board against one wall is scrawled in red and black suggestions for additional flavors from customers. The ideas range from earnest-seeming pleas (AVOCADO! and Sugar free for diabetics) through the intriguing (sweet potato, Cheddar/apple pie and — I'd like to see them pull it off — pad thai) to the merely nasty (cheeseburger: cold beef fat is particularly vile). Some that popped for me:

• elderflower
• green tea
• mango-chile-lime
• coconut-basil
• IPA
• ginger and Hennessey
• Thai ice[d] tea
• PBR
• bacon
• black licorice
• jasmine-green apple
• bacon-maple doughnut

I may pass on the sex and KFC original recipe flavors if they ever get made. Jackasses. Thai tea, though, is great as a sorbet drizzled with cream. An orphaned bottle of Thai tea syrup in the fridge got me thinking What the hell am I going to do with that? Make delicious dessert, that's what.

These days, even convenience stores carry the formerly exotic dulce de leche ice cream — but Jim Beam and ricotta or bacon-maple doughnut? I either need to make that kind of thing myself or hunt it down. Because I can’t just haul my ass to LA whenever I get a hankering for unusual ice cream, you know I’ll be tweaking salt and honey recipes.

Let me know if you've got a workable recipe for that, eh?

Scoops
712 N Heliotrope Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90029
(323) 906-2649

There’s a Scoops website, but it’s less about the business than the art that rotates through. Better to check out Scoops' Yelp page for useful information about the ice cream itself.

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