Conversations with Uday always trigger pursuits

BreakingNaan shares some part of our food soul and philosophy with our dearest friend Uday. We say share because the passion and knowledge accumulated with our friend is unmatchable. As always we sat in his living room discussing food and the conversation as usual leads to million ideas and a thousand questions we feel compelled to go looking for answers.

Uday that day was in pursuit of the perfectly wholesome mango ice cream and jamun ice-cream with objective being of keeping the ingredients pure and high quality and avoid any unneeded ingredients. We shared our gelato experience in Italy and how the commercial and tourist targeting gelato places on every corner were disappointing in being sugary and lacking the true essence of flavor. We talked how mango ice cream should taste of the mangoes of the season and how ice cream should not feel and taste of dairy or sugar overwhelmingly. Unless of-course you are showcasing the best dairy, then you can have a ice-cream of flavor called malai or doodh and that is what should shine through.

Thus began the quest to improve our knowledge about ice-creams.

Inspiration from Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice-Cream Book

Van Leeuwen are behind the trailblazing trucks of artisan icecreams in New York. We came across their book and some excerpts from the book absolutely resonated.

Their ice cream philosophy is quoted very well in the book

“we scaled way back on the sugar content to let the individual flavors really pop. We learned that most producers were loading their ice cream with sweeteners to create a sticky, generic flavor that overwhelmed the palate. We, however, were after ice cream where you could actually taste the flavor and that would taste as it should.” – Van Leeuwen Artisan Icecream Book

With the objectives of their ice cream resonating with the discussion we had we went ahead and read the whole book and thoroughly enjoyed it. We learnt their methid and started trying out their techniques for the icecream.

At the base of it all they build their icecream on top of a custard base with good quality milk and eggs. The sugar is cut back and the flavors are allowed to shine.

We started practicing their ice-creams, attempting the universal favorite of chocolate first. It was a resounding treat.Want to leave you with another direct quote from the book to serve as a bar for making your ice creams

“We also noticed that the more of sweet flavor you ate, the more it intensified on your palate. Nina Planck once wrote, quoting her mother, “If you taste sugar on the first bite, it will be cloying by the last.” If you start eating ice cream and it tastes noticeably sweet on the first bite, by the time you are done, what had started out as pleasant will most likely have become overwhelmingly sweet, and that thickness and stickiness will linger unpleasantly on your palate long after you’ve finished eating.” – Van Leeuwen artisan icecream book.

Fantastic book to own and read!

Experimenting with the custard base

We followed some of the recipes to the tee. We cooked the custard with milk and eggs and sometimes sugar reducing it to the necessary consistency on the stove, stirring with a wooden spoon and watching over it. Then we also thought of using our sous vide to cook the custard base and we gave it a try and it worked really well.

We cooked the base at 165 for 1.5 hours and 170 for 30 minutes and let it chill overnight.

This worked out quite well so we now have an alternative for cooking the custard. You can also make multiple bags ready to make different small batch ice creams in the week.

Anjeer and Gulkand

Once we practiced the recipes we wanted to start trying some flavor combinations of our own. We did not venture too far and when figs were in season we immediately went for their Fig, walnut and honey ice cream.

We roasted the figs with just a touch of muscovado brown sugar.

We decided to substitute the honey for something very unique for indian homes – Gulkand. You have seen it before when we made the Gulkand french toast.

It is a jam traditionally made with rose petals and sugar cooked slowly in a jar exposed to natural sunlight. We had a commercial variety which was quite decent and comparitively low in sugar. Homemade variety would be so mich better as you can reduce the sugar even more and use it while fresh, if someone will make it happen for us, i can bet it will be Uday. That is what became our flavor base. As always we have had gulkand ice cream, we also have had anjeer (fig) ice cream. Our biggest complaint was neither tasted of anjeer or gulkand.

We churned our ice cream base in our ice-cream maker with the gulkand added. What we miss in gulkand sometimes is the rose aroma although the flavor is definitely there. So we added some dried rose petals used typically for rose tea. You can use rose water instead.

Once the icecream started to set we copped the roasted figs and added them at the last minute along with chopped toasted walnuts. Make sure not to over churn your ice cream in the ice cream maker till its set hard. Stop at the soft-serve consistency. Eat it immediately at this point even – its perfect. Ours tasted of gulkand, the anjeer(fig) tasted of fig and the walnuts added the nutty charm.

When you freeze it, already keep a frozen empty container ready. Cover it with plastic at the top when you fill the ice cream to avoid freezer burn. And before serving take it out and let it soften.

Upon freezing the figs turn a gorgeous red, intensifying in color. This was a surprise to us, so we will have to research a bit more but we welcome the color definitely.

Only frontier to cover now is lot of our friends are vegeterians who dont eat eggs. Van Leeuwen have a vegan recipe too which we will be sure to try next. Then figure out a way to make a mix of the two that allows dairy but is vegeterian (no eggs). What flavors would you tackle if you were making ice cream at home 🙂 Leave us some ideas in the comments!