Ice Cream Ireland

There aren’t too many fruits that seem to grow well in our damp climate, at least not in the garden of someone as horticulturally-challenged as myself. However, I do have some wonderful apple trees in the back of the house, and the apples this year are big and full of flavour.

So far, we have just been eating them, but I think I may turn some of them into ice cream – perhaps an apple brandy or blackberry and apple flavour that we can serve in the shops for the autumn.

The birds around the place are quite happy at the moment to be sharing in the bounty, so I’d better get picking soon!

Technorati tags: apple, Ireland, ice cream

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I had a very welcome visit from Con Traas yesterday, the man behind The Apple Farm. We have been long time fans of his Karmine Apple Juice, but this time he dropped in some bottles of his sparkling apple juice (photo above), which is sold only at the farm shop in Tipperary.

It’s an absolutely delightful product – earthy and a perfect balance of sweetness and tartness.

In addition, he dropped in 6 kilos of plums, which are small and flavourful.

That means we will have a couple batches of plum ice cream coming up soon, and it should be a great flavour as we come out of summer.

I’m thinking a plum and brandy ice cream? I’ll post a recipe as soon as we’ve figured it out…

Technorati tags: apple farm, juice, ice cream, plum

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 We have a scooping cabinet going into Dublin for the first time, and we’re planning an ice cream party to help launch it. (If you live in Dublin and love our ice cream, keep Friday the 19th late afternoon free, and stay tuned!)

We’ve been thinking a lot about what to offer in terms of ice cream, and it seems to me that the theme should be “Pride of Place.” There are so many good foods and food (and drink) producers here, that we’re going to take a few Irish foods and drinks and turn them into ice creams. Especially in these uncertain times, highlighting the Irish produce we love seems only a good thing (more about that here). 

Anyway, here are the flavours we have talked about:

* Bluebell Falls Goats cheese with honey and thyme
* Chocolate with Kilbeggan whiskey
* Lorge chocolate truffle
* Porterhouse Brain Blásta beer
* Eden Apple brandy with Irish apples
* Irish coffee
* McCambridge’s brown bread
* Connemara seaweed (possibly with Irish salmon)
* Barry’s Gold Blend Tea
* Guinness
* Bailey’s

Technorati tags: food, Ireland, Dublin, murphys, ice cream

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 I heard some sad news from Colm, the farmer who delivers us our Kerry Cow Milk, and that is that one of his Kerry cows, the one in the photo above, has died suddenly a week after giving birth. She was known as 308, not the prettiest name, perhaps, but she was a pretty cow, and I had many photos of her. 

It’s easy to forget, when there’s milk coming in, that there are animals behind it all, and so today I’ll lift a cone to the memory of the pretty 308.

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 Business is a funny thing. Some things can be easy, and some things hard, and it’s difficult to predict in advance which will be which. The most annoying issues are ones that really aren’t that big, ones that should be easily solved, but for whatever reason we just can’t do so.

One of these issues has been cones. My brother and I have always been a fan of waffle cones, and when we set up the business, we had never thought we would serve anything else. However, finding cones we liked (and were reasonably priced) was quite another matter. We did find some decent ones early on, but so many of them kept arriving broken, that we gave up. We’ve been looking and looking, for almost nine years. 

Time went by, and we served our ice cream on wafer cones instead, even though we never were that excited by them. We explored the possibility of making cones, and we ordered up samples when ever we heard of a source somewhere in Europe.

Anyway, problem solved! My brother managed to find a company making great waffle cones, and we’ve just received a few pallets of them. They are extremely tasty, and they are in one piece. 

It looks like the end of the wafer cone is nigh at Murphys. Finally.

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 I feel a bit like the character Vianne from the movie Chocolat, since I’ve been writing so much about chocolate during Lent (she opens her shop in the middle of it). Apologies, to anyone who has given it up, but it’s what I’m working on at the moment!

I thought it might be a good thing to give a few points on making chocolate chips, in case you wish to make your own for your ice cream.

Here are a few options:

1. The easiest way is to chop one of your favourite chocolate bars into pieces sized to suit your tastes.

2. A second way, if you like finer pieces is to take a chocolate bar and use a vegetable peeler or grater to create chocolate shards.

3. What I’ve been doing recently (photos), is to take some tempered chocolate, spread a thin layer on baking parchment, and then cut it into chunks. It seems to work quite well as long as you cut the chocolate as soon as it has set, but before it hardens fully. After you’ve cut it, let it harden fully, then remove from the parchment.

Note: If you find the chocolate too brittle in the ice cream, you can either use a chocolate with more fat (more toward milk and less toward dark) or add a bit of grape seed oil (5% or so of volume) while you are melting it.

Technorati tags: chips, chocolate, making, ice cream

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 Just in case you’re wondering, the bottle JP is holding is not our strategy for keeping up our spirits during the recession. It’s Kilbeggan whiskey from Cooley, Ireland’s only independent whiskey distillery. We love it in the ice creams (it’s a great, malty, robust drinking whiskey as well), and we’re going to switch over to using it exclusively (we have been using Paddy or Jameson, however not only do we prefer the Kilbeggan, but it’s great to support an independent Irish company).

Technorati tags: cooley, ice cream, whiskey, kilbeggan

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This has been a hard week, and it’s only Wednesday. First a freezer failed, and we lost a lot of ice cream, and then we had news that Fresh Supermarkets in Dublin are thinking about dropping us. If you buy your Murphys Ice Cream at Fresh, please make your displeasure known to the manager!

However, there is something that cheers me up each spring, and that is when I hear from Colm, the farmer who supplies us with Kerry Cow milk, telling me that the first of his Kerry cows has given birth. It means that we’ll soon again have a regular supply of rare and delicious milk for the summer season.

I always drive over to meet the first one, and it always leaves me delighted. For me, it puts everything else in perspective…

Technorati tags: breed, ice cream, farm, cow, Kerry, Dingle

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