Recipes

Chocolate Crust for Ice Cream

Chocolate Crust Sauce This recipe, from this week’s Irish Times article, is a simple way of enjoying great quality chocolate and ice cream together. It is designed to form an unsweetened hard crust on ice cream, and I suggest vanilla, so you don’t have competing flavours. The butter is simply to make the chocolate less brittle…

Gourmet Chocolate Crust

Ingredients:

  • 100g high quality, dark chocolate
  • 10g (2 teasp) unsalted butter

What to do:

  1. Melt the chocolate and butter together in a double boiler or microwave.
  2. Stir until fully combined.
  3. Pour over vanilla ice cream.

Enjoy!

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Gelato alla Crema

Crema with Cow Creamer This is the recipe for the Irish Times article that ties into the previous post…

Gelato alla Crema

Ingredients:

  • 500ml milk
  • 250ml cream
  • 200g sugar
  • 6 egg yolks

What to do:

  1. Cream with Cow Cream 2Beat the sugar and egg yolks together until thick and pale yellow.
  2. Bring the milk to a simmer.
  3. Remove from the heat.
  4. Beat the milk into the eggs and sugar in a slow stream.
  5. Pour the mixture back into pan and place over low heat.
  6. Stir until the custard thickens slightly (around 70C).
  7. Immediately transfer into another container and place in the refrigerator until cool.
  8. Whip the cream and fold into the mix.
  9. Freeze using a domestic ice cream machine, or cover and place in the freezer.

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Chocolate Coffee Bean Crunch

Chocolate Coffee Crunch Ice Cream For today’s Irish Times article, I wrote about our team in prodution (the photo below shows Cian, Christophe, and JP), running things in August, and of trying to squeeze in new flavours in our busiest time of year.

Production StaffThe recipe came from an idea from Cian, our Dingle shop manager, who helped as we worked through it. It’s very tasty!

Cian’s Chocolate Coffee Crunch

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup sugar
  • 5 egg yolks
  • 1 3/8 cups cream
  • 1 1/8 cups milk
  • 1/4 vanilla bean, cut lengthwise
  • 1/3 cup espresso beans
  • 2/3 cup 70% chocolate (100gm)

What to do:

  1. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler.
  2. Crushed Coffee BeansBreak the coffee beans into smallish pieces using the bottom of a bowl or a food processor.
  3. Mix the crushed beans into the chocolate and spread on a baking tray to harden.
  4. Beat the sugar and egg yolks together until thick and pale yellow.
  5. Bring the milk to a simmer.  Remove from the heat.
  6. Beat the milk into the eggs and sugar in a slow stream.
  7. Pour the mixture back into pan, add the vanilla bean and place over low heat. Stir until the custard thickens (around 70C).
  8. Immediately place in the refrigerator until cool.
  9. Remove the vanilla bean.
  10. Cut the hardened chocolate into small pieces then use a spatula to separate from the baking tray. Stir into the custard.
  11. Whip the cream and fold into the mix.
  12. Freeze using a domestic ice cream machine, or cover and place in the freezer.

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Bakaliowe Ice Cream

Bakaliowe Ice Cream For this week’s column in the Irish Times (in today’s issue), I decided to write about our multicultural staff, especially in our Killarney shop (photo below of some of the team). As part of the piece, I included this recipe for Polish ice cream, given to me by our Killarney shop manager, Sylwia. The test batch was very tasty, if you like fruit and nuts!

Bakaliowe Ice Cream

Killarney TeamIngredients:

  • 1 cup sugar
  • 5 egg yolks
  • 1 3/8 cups cream
  • 1 1/8 cups milk
  • 1/4 vanilla bean, cut lengthwise
  • 1/2 cup raisins
  • 1/2 cup dried fruits
  • 1/2 cup almonds and other nuts

What to do:

  1. Beat the sugar and egg yolks together until thick and pale yellow.
  2. Bring the milk to a simmer. Remove from the heat.
  3. Beat the milk into the eggs and sugar in a slow stream.
  4. Pour the mixture back into pan, add the vanilla bean and place over low heat.
  5. Stir until the custard thickens (around 70C).
  6. Immediately remove from the heat, and place in the refrigerator until cool.
  7. Remove the vanilla bean.
  8. Stir in the fruits and nuts.
  9. Whip the cream and fold into the mix.
  10. Freeze using a domestic ice cream machine, or cover and place in the freezer.

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Raspberry Coulis

Raspberry CoulisWith raspberries in season, a great topping for ice cream is raspberry coulis. It’s tart and delicious and dead simple to make!

Murphys Raspberry Coulis

Ingredients:

  • Small punnet (125 gm) raspberries
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 teaspoon fresh lime juice

What to do:

  1. Combine all the ingredients in a blender or food process and puree until smooth.
  2. Pass through a fine sieve using a rubber spatula or the back of a wooden spoon until only the seeds are left.
  3. Discard the seeds.
  4. Enjoy!

Yield: 150 ml coulis

It will last around 3 days if refrigerated, but I suggest you eat it straight away!

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Caramelised Fructose

Caramelised Fructose Fructose is a sugar found in fruit among other things, and is often recommended for diabetics because it has a very low glycemic index (GI). It is three times sweeter than normal sugar (sucrose) and has a slightly different taste – a little fruity or acidic.

I must say that there is mixed research on the health benefits of fructose. In fact, there are those who consider it quite unhealthy. Perhaps it’s like many things – use it in moderation.

What I do know for sure is that fructose can be caramelised. I’ve been playing around with it, and it makes an extraordinarily beautiful and tasty caramel sauce. It’s very, very sweet, so definitely use very small amounts of it, especially if you’re diabetic!!!

If you want to make it, here’s how:

Caramel sauce fructoseFructose Caramel Sauce

Ingredients:

50g powdered fructose (I bought an organic box of it from my local health food store)

150ml apple juice

What to do:

  1. Put the fructose in a saucepan and shake it so it’s evenly dispersed.
  2. Pour 50ml of the apple juice over it and cook over medium heat.
  3. When it starts to brown, start stirring, and continue stirring until it turns a deep honey colour.
  4. Immediately remove from the heat and stir in the rest of the apple juice.
  5. It will still be very hot. Let it cool.

That’s all! Enjoy!

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Tea and Coffee Pops

Iced Tea Pop I realise that juice pops and frozen bananas are not, strictly, sugar free. Fruit does have sugar in it (fructose), although not refined. For those for whom fruit sugar is a problem, and for something slightly more adult, you can try making pops from coffee and tea. The flavour comes through quite well, and you can use your favourite sweetener if you feel it needs it. Herbal teas can work quite well (the photo above is a rose/licorice tea), but brew them quite strong!

Kids with ice pops

Back to juice pops – I wrote in my previous post that the kids in our family loved them. On the right is the proof – a photo showing my brother, sister and I enjoying them on a summer day in upstate NY.

Our favourite flavour was grape, but since my mother was usually faced with melted grape pop-stained clothes, she pushed us toward orange!

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Frozen Juice Pops

Frozen Juice Pops Another quick and easy sugar-free iced option is frozen juice pops (lollies). This one really brings me back to my childhood. I have many memories of hot summer days that involve these treats. My mother was really into natural foods and organics, and although we were never weaned off ice cream, she tried to keep our sugar intake down by making these. We ate them quite happily indeed.

What’s really brilliant is that you can choose a juice that you (or your little ones) like and make the frozen equivalent. It’s hard to go wrong with that!

Juice lolliesI found a form for the pops in my local hardware store, and nothing could be easier in terms of making them. Simply pour the juice into the form, insert the stick, and put it in the freezer. Within a couple of hours, you will have a wonderfully refreshing frozen snack.

It’s definitely worth buying the good stuff here or using fresh juice. There are many delicious organic juices that you can find in health food shops. In any case, the taste will reflect the quality of the juice, and clearly if you add a juice mix that has sugar in it, it will not be sugar-free!

My favourites were and are:

  • Pomegranate Juice
  • Orange Juice
  • Grape Juice (red grapes)

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