Olive Oil

At first thought Olive Oil and Ice Cream wouldn't seem to go together, but thanks to a neighborhood pizza place (Pizzeria Lola: Link) where they offer homemade v*nilla ice cream with olive oil and sea salt on top. Sounds odd but it's very good and made me want to try a similar recipe in the Humphry Slocombe cookbook.  

Humphry Slocombe created this recipe after visiting their own neighbors at McEvoy Ranch which produces high end olive oils, which you can order online here: Link

While I didn't use McEvoy Olive Oil, I took the book's suggestion and purchased about 12oz of high quality oil at the nearby Whole Foods for roughly $15. 

Here we go...here is the set up:

After mixing together the egg yolks and sugar the fairly substantial amount of olive oil is mixed in:

Once the olive oil is mixed in the sugar and eggs look pretty glazed:

Meanwhile, I microplaned half of an orange and half of a lemon and set aside before eventually adding it to the ice cream:

After combining all of the ingredients, including the cream and milk, I placed overnight in a fridge (notice the flecks of zest in the mixture):

Then the mixture is placed in the ice cream maker:

After about 20 minutes in the mixer I put in a container and placed in the freezer overnight to let firm up for consistency:

And here's the finished product. The recipe says that the olive oil ice cream goes well with other deserts, including fruit, and since we've received strawberries the last three weeks in our CSA I put them together:

Verdict

I thought this recipe was a little hit and miss. Personally, I wasn't a huge fan of the citrus zest which I thought was a bit overpowering. The olive oil was nice and a unique flavor, but it was a bit jarring at first before mellowing out. Another recommendation from the book was to pair it with a little chocolate, which I did and thought that it was a much better pair than fruit. 

Author Note

I've been a little slow with my posts and behind on my goal of at least one post a week. Sometimes work gets in the way of ice cream making! I've already made my next flavor (Fluffernutter) and will have a post soon on that recipe within the next couple days.

Secret Breakfast

One of Humphry Slocombe's most popular flavors is called "Secret Breakfast" which is the only flavor that is offered daily. It's also been featured a fair amount in the media and could almost be described as their signature flavor. While searching the internet for more information or backstory on the flavor, I did find this video from the cooking channel which features Jake making Secret Breakfast in the back of Humphry Slocombe: LINK

When I visited myself last year, I hadn't yet heard about the flavor, but when the flavor was described to me as "bourbon and cork flake flavored ice cream" I went for it. I'm glad I did because it was incredible and unlike any other ice cream I'd ever had. In many ways this recipe is the reason I bought the Humphry Slocombe cookbook, why I want to make every recipe in the book, and why I started this blog to document. 

Getting started. Yes, that's a bottle of Maker's Mark (I didn't know until later that HS uses Jim Bean) and a box of corn flakes:

I'm not planning on doing this for the rest of my posts (because it would become repetitive fast) but I thought I would do a better job documenting the basic first steps of the HS ice cream making process. Here is the first step. Setting up an ice bath which will eventually be used to rapidly cool our ice cream mixture:

Next the cream, milk, and salt are heated up in a saucepan enough to be hot, but not boiling:

Meanwhile, the egg yolks and sugar are combined into a bowl and whisked:

Into something that sort of resembles deviled egg mix:

Once the cream/milk mixture is warm enough, a little bit is added to the eggs and sugar mixture:

After adding about half of the cream/milk the mixing bowl contents are added back into the saucepan and heated up to the verge of boiling for a few minutes:

Once cooked, the mixture is strained into the ice bath bowl which was set up at the beginning of the process . It's then left to cool for a little bit before being placed in the fridge. Some people say that you can make the ice cream after the base sits in the fridge for only an hour, but I generally keep it stored for about a day in the fridge as I think it allows it to cool down significantly more and allows the flavors to develop.

The next day I set up my Cuisinart Ice Cream maker and poured in my base mixture to let spin:

Now, the HS Cookbook states that the Secret Breakfast is one of its softest ice creams due to the alcohol content, so I was a little worried that the mixture wouldn't freeze. To combat that I left it in the mixer an extra 10 min or so to get it a little thicker:

What's the "secret" to the Secret Breakfast? When I searched around for recipes prior to the HS book being released, I saw quite a few that essentially just dumped corn flakes into the ice cream toward the end of the process. The problem with that is the corn flakes would quickly become soggy after sitting in the not 100% frozen ice cream. In order to ensure crispy "corn flakes" HS makes corn flake cookies, which are baked to the edge of burnt. Outside of the ice cream, they essentially taste like sugar cookies with corn flakes:

The cookies are then chopped up:

And then dumped into the mixing, nearly complete, ice cream:

After placing the ice cream back into the fridge for a little bit to solidify a bit more and to reach a more firm consistency, here is the final product:

I need to work on my scooping skills.

Verdict

Pretty fantastic. The bourbon flavor is stronger than I remember, but is really good when mixed with the v@n*lla flavored ice cream and corn flake cookies. It's a pretty "light" ice cream in my opinion, and tasted really good sitting outside on a warm spring night after dinner. We ended up with way more cookies that we needed for the recipe, so we decided to freeze the extras and have them on hand for when this is make again.