Totally Luscious Raspberry IceCream
Totally Luscious Raspberry IceCream
Making ice cream is a science of delicately balancing flavours with texture. All this very much depends on the fat/sugar to water content of your ice cream. The higher the fat/sugar to the water content the smoother the ice cream because the ice crystals are small...or some such thing. I'm no food scientist, just a passionate lover of ice cream and I have dug through the Internet to get you guys the best information on how to make smooth and moorish ice cream.
The one thing that has eluded me somewhat is to make freezer soft ice cream. Apparently the reason ice cream is softer when you buy it out of the supermarket freezer is because their freezers are a little warmer than our home freezers. Okay so that's not really something we can change unless we have a freezer entirely dedicated to ice cream...now there's a thought!
Another reason commercial ice cream is softer is because it is made with warfarin, a blood thinner used to kill rats and keep blood clots from forming in susceptible people, usually anyone in their 70s or 80s at which stage ice cream might just be a better medicine than aspirin...there's another thought!
So here is what I have gleaned from my readings on how to make ice cream a bit softer in the freezer:
Adding alcohol (I tried adding vodka, but I gather that one would have to add a great deal of it, because my ice cream still froze rock hard)
Fat as in egg yolk, fat content of cream (coconut cream), extra virgin olive oil
Sugar; i.e. honey for us SCDers
Air; churning, egg white
Letting it soften before serving.
Texture in ice cream is also really important. The ice cream I made with vodka, coconut cream and berries was a little gritty. I didn't like that. I like my ice cream to be really smooth and melty.
After several batches I have come up with an ice cream I think is totally moorish with a smooth texture that melts in your mouth. It still freezes pretty hard, but not as hard as my previous batches and when placed in a shallow container, say about two inches high and left for 15-20 minutes on the counter before serving it is completely perfect.
Raspberry Icecream
500 g/17.8 oz frozen raspberries
½ lemon (juice)
¾ cup honey
1 tsp vanilla essence
4 egg yolks from large eggs
3 Tbs extra virgin olive oil
400 ml/13.5 fl oz coconut cream (placed in the fridge overnight and then drained of liquid)
Place the defrosted raspberries and lemon juice into a pot and cook on low heat for 45 minutes or until reduced by half.
Let cool to room temperature, strain through a sieve to remove the seeds, add the honey and combine.
Mix the vanilla essence, egg yolks, oil and coconut cream until smooth. Then combine with the raspberries.
Place into the fridge covered until cold and then into your ice cream maker as per the manufacturers instructions.
Once churned, place the ice cream into a shallow airtight dish in the freezer for two hours before serving.