three bowls

Have you been an oat-bran-eatin' vegan for many years and now feel left out when your friends talk about their high cholesterol?  Ice cream and dessert sauces can be an easy and tasty way to catch up!  Quickly!

Ice cream and dessert sauces, despite their low nutritional value and high really-bad-for-you value, continue to top my list of fun new cooking projects.  I’m realizing I really enjoy the kind of cooking where the ingredients are radically modified or transformed, and with both ice cream and some dessert sauces, the end result can be so structurally different than the raw ingredients, it feels like magic. 

(Maybe this is another reason I’m rarely motivated to cook proteins and don’t feel any real lacking in my life since I’m not currently eating meat or poultry.  While you can certainly do something creative with them, they are generally pretty much exactly what they are just cooked, without the, again, kind of magical transformation of, say, sugar to caramel or dough to bread.)

Last week I had a lot of opportunities to cook for other people, so I was inspired to finally try my first custard-based ice cream recipe from The Perfect Scoop, a dark chocolate ice cream.  I waited until I had someone to share it with as I am not sure I want to give myself leave to handle an entire batch of what is, essentially, a bucket of tasty cholesterol solo, but I was cooking for two sets of new parents and if anyone needs some comfort food, it’s them.

I have been hesitant to make a custard-based ice cream because a) what do you do with all those egg whites you have left at the end? and b) you have to pay so much attention and be so careful (body sagging with exhaustion).  These are not activities in which I generally, ya know, shine and excel.

But I was simultaneously making some homemade granola bars (which call for egg whites) and I’m becoming so almost compulsively curious about trying new things that I felt like the novelty of the process would be the chew toy I could throw to my rambunctious puppy of a brain that would help it stay focused on the task at hand. I was able to slow down and focus enough to get all of my equipment set out and all of my ingredients measured out, something that I know is the best way to work but that I am sometimes too impatient to do.

But with something like a custard, preparation is even more important.  The main thing to watch out for when making a custard-based ice cream is to ensure that the eggs become tempered by the warm liquid, but not scrambled.  When I poured the custard into the waiting cream set into an ice bath, there were some itsy bitsy solids, but since the instructions directed me to pour it through a strainer, I thought that maybe I was still safe.

Once the mixture went through the ice cream maker, I was reassured.  It appeared the itsy bitsy solids didn’t impact the final result as I had a delicious and incredibly creamy ice cream.  Since I’d been making the uneggy kind, and using less fat in my milk, I hadn’t actually yet produced something that seemed like store-bought.  But this was the same kind of rich, creamy, yet slightly chewy frozen dessert I’m used to getting from the store.

Maybe even more so.  I actually could barely eat a small bowl of it.  My sister, who is also a sweet lover, had the same reaction.  I actually didn’t mind turning the rest of it over to the new parents we were dining with later that evening as I actually felt…sated.  It was as rich as the richest chocolate mousse you’ve ever had.

But delicious, and I cannot recommend Callebaut chocolate enough, the kind I’ve been using lately and that is so mainly levels above anything I’ve ever tasted before (granted, I’ve always been more into quantity than quality with chocolate).  (For Seattleites, as mentioned in the past, Pacific Food Importers – south of International District – seems to have a very good price on it.)

I also used the Callebaut as chocolate chunks in a Philadelphia-style vanilla ice cream, and the lovely mellowness of the vanilla bean-infused cream is such a perfect match up against the slightly bitter sweetness and crunchiness of the chunks.  I made that one full-fat and while a full-fat Philadelphia is still nowhere as decadent feeling as the custard style…um, it’s still pretty dang good.  This was supposed to go to another set of new parents, but I brought some over to a friend’s house on Saturday and…uh…the rest of it didn’t make it to the parents.  By now my ice cream maker bowl is frozen again, so this next batch will be made and delivered swiftly!

I already have talked about the Peanut Butter Caramel sauce I made that was a little underwhelming (although folks who haven’t tried the Oliver’s Twist version still liked mine a lot).  I’ve also mentioned the Salted Caramel Sauce I made from The Perfect Scoop.  I made another batch this past weekend for taking to my friend’s house.

I was supposed to be helping him pack, and I was already late, but as I waited for the butter and sugar in the Salted Caramel Sauce to turn just the right shade of golden brown, I thought to myself, Heck, why not make another dessert sauce?  So I made this Coffee Sauce I had just seen in a little blurb on Chow. 

Lord almighty is that stuff good over vanilla ice cream.  It gets my coveted Five-Star Holy Crap rating.  By itself, the espresso used in the sauce is almost bitter.  But that bitterness against the sweet fattiness of ice cream?  That’s right: holy crap.  I don’t think I made the cleanest batch ever – there were some hard chunks of hardened caramel I couldn’t melt and had to again fish out, but whatever.  Chow recommends pairing the sauce with toasted squares of pound cake.  I can’t imagine that would be a bad idea.