Like everyone else, sometimes I feel a powerful need to grab a pint of Häagen-Dazs dulce de leche and dig out shavings of soft, cold, sweet caramel until my brain decides that I am no longer at optimal body temperature.
Before I get on my actual soapbox, let’s be clear: this is the mature, adult, restrained version of this urge. When I was in college, I happily dug my way through entire pints of it, or Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter Cup, or Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, or Ben and Jerry’s Strawberry Cheesecake (look, some of us didn’t grow up with the stuff at the local drugstore, so count your blessings), and while I’m sure there are excellent medical and psychological reasons to regret doing that, when I ask myself whether I would’ve preferred to not have eaten that ice cream, I have to admit that I do not. After all, that’s ice cream someone else would’ve gotten to have, and unlike me, they might’ve quit early.
I am not here, however, to extol the virtues of store-bought ice cream, mostly because the day ice cream needs a salesperson, something has gone profoundly wrong in the human psyche. I am here to tell you that you should be making your own, both in that you should get yourself an ice cream maker, and that the ice cream you make in it should be something that can’t just catch your eye sitting in the Walgreens freezer.
This house first enjoyed the presence of a Cuisinart two-quart churner shortly after December 25th, 2019, when it was used to make a salted caramel ice cream. No, that’s not especially weird as far as flavors go, but it was very good: decadent in the way only the French-style custard ice cream can be, full of toasty and warm flavors cut with stinging hints of salt.
Of course, you may remember that, a few months after we enjoyed our delightful salted caramel, the entire world went to hell and there were more important things to do, like not getting sick and making a lot of refried beans; even in the midst of this calamity, we persevered, not only in our work but in our determination to get properly freaky with our ice cream flavors. There were the multiple glorious failures of (admittedly, no-churn) cherry cheesecake ice cream, and the blueberry ice cream that, based on advice, included the skins—and therefore became quite a bit more hydrated than a good ice cream needs to be, though it was delightfully indigo.
Good experiments? Undoubtedly. Frustrating? Yes, especially since I often had to eat the results by myself, and no one likes to eat what amounts to all the bad parts of blueberry frozen yogurt.
As eggs, milk and cream rose in price seemingly week after week, I put the ice cream maker away and resolved to try it again when I felt more willing to accept that no one bats 1.000, not even equipped with a master recipe and a decent knowledge of how to switch out flavor components for each other. Four years passed in this détente between me and my own fear of failure, punctuated by the occasional thought that yes, I would like to make ice cream out of basil one day, or admiring the pale yellow scoop a friend showed us all of what turned out to be flavored with extra virgin olive oil, or wondering what fruits would stand up to the muscle of a well-tempered custard.
In April of this year, to honor friends who visited us for the eclipse, we dug the Cuisinart out of the freezer, had a horrible moment where we thought the churning chamber wasn’t freezing correctly, and embarked on our Second Great Ice Cream Journey. We tried to recreate our salted caramel success, and let it go long enough that it became a more bitter, but toastier, flavor I tentatively named “burnt caramel,” which I was surprised to find out everyone but me enjoyed, or at least, enjoyed more than the second flavor we tried, much more traditionally sweet, made by steeping chai spices in the custard.
Nothing like an undeserved, unintended success to gladden the heart.
Over the summer, when plenteous fresh fruits arrived, I tried my hand at a simple strawberry custard (too eggy, but if you wanted a graham-less version of the Strawberry Cheesecake flavor I had loved so much in college [and I very much did want that, to be clear], this was more or less that) and an easy blueberry sherbet (the purple scoop in the picture to the left) that was perhaps still a bit too creamy, but that might have been due to the blueberries being a little early in the season.
Then arrived my proudest moment: if you’ve ever had sweet-and-sour chicken and wondered whether the sauce would be good frozen, well, allow me to introduce you to spiced plum sorbet (that’d be the pink scoop), made with red sugar plums I cooked down with ginger paste and five spice powder. It’s quite sweet, as you might expect, and because the ginger was mostly uncooked, it’s still got most of its kick: it will also, by the time you’re done eating it, successfully desiccate the entire inside of your mouth. Very fun with a little fresh fruit, or as a way to clean an overloaded palate.
At this point, we both know you’re wondering what’s up with the picture up top. What is that pale yellow geometric mistake, covered in brown stuff both liquid and solid? Why are you putting a picture of pound cake on an article about ice cream?
Well, you see, that’s sweet corn ice cream, or at least it would’ve been if the corn had actually been sweet. What, you thought I was overselling it when I titled the article?
As part of this year’s sojourn back to the Isle of Enchantment (where the best coffee is produced), we visited an absolutely wonderful place named Heladería Lares, which has a bunch of very strange ice cream flavors: not only did it have corn (which was delightfully sweet and buttery), but also rice and pigeon peas (also strangely sweet, and quite smooth until you found the frozen pigeon pea in the middle), cilantrillo (a green herb that looks like cilantro and is used in a lot of Puerto Rican cooking), rice and sausage (a favorite recipe of my mother’s), pumpkin, and, as I remembered from my last visit decades ago, garlic.
Unfortunately, we only got to have one free sample apiece, and there was no way to ask for some kind of sampler of the weird ice creams—seriously, why do I always have to come up with genius marketing ideas for other people’s businesses—so the corn was my one indulgence.
The moment I had it, I knew I’d want to recreate it, and once I stiffened the sinews, summoned up the blood, and looked up a New York Times recipe, I gave it my level best. I cooked the cobs in the milk and heavy cream, used fewer egg yolks so the corn flavor could shine through more, and . . .
. . . well, like I said, no one bats 1.000. The eggs separated in the cooking process, but that didn’t seem to impact the texture or flavor much; what we did discover, upon trying the ice cream when it had fully frozen, was that it simply didn’t taste that much like the sweet corn we’d been expecting, and certainly not like the golden goodness we’d had in Puerto Rico.
Another failure; my first in four years, and though I probably could’ve done a better job with the recipe, I felt like I’d been set up to fail a little bit, either by bad materials or a recipe that treated the idea of corn as an ice cream ingredient as something of a silly novelty, not to be taken seriously. If I’d had my druthers, I would’ve likely toasted the corn in a little butter, maybe involved some brown sugar, or found some other way to bring out the deeper flavors I know I tasted back in July, off just one little spoon, and which had so inspired me.
Was it a total loss, though?
Luckily, no. Add some homemade caramel and some chopped-up pecans, and you’ve got yourself a pretty good facsimile for kettle corn, if you’ve ever wanted to have it be smooth and cold for some reason. That’s the other thing: sometimes, a bad ice cream is two toppings away from a perfectly serviceable dessert. After everyone else got tired of pretending they really, really liked that burnt caramel (seriously, people, no one is judging you for liking sweet things, you’re allowed, stop trying to look respectable), I finished it off with a little good fruity olive oil and big sea salt flakes to cut the bitterness.
Even now, after so many successes and salvaged failures, there are ice creams I’m not brave enough to make yet. A friend shared a recipe for a sweet plantain ice cream I’m dying to taste, but which requires enough moving parts to worry me; I still haven’t dared buy the basil leaves to make the ice cream I know everyone else will hate because they’ll think it’s basically green licorice; I’ve had the olive oil I need on hand for a few months and still haven’t tried to make what I’ve been informed, by at least three people now, will be a game-changer.
But the possibility is there, and it’s the possibility—the potential, sitting there in anticipatory trembling—that matters. Sure, I could settle and make a nice vanilla bean instead; I certainly have the ingredients. I could try another caramel, and get it right this time.
For me, though, where’s the fun in that? I’m here to be a mad scientist, smashing together fats and proteins and flavors that shouldn’t work together. I want to find out if pomegranate can retain its flavor once frozen; if a honeynut squash would still be as sugary sweet when it’s been turned into a custard; whether apples could be less garbage if they got turned into a smooth scoop of dessert.
When I need my caramel fix, I know the store freezer will be there waiting.