Basil Ice Cream

*Post by Angela.

Mark has had his ice cream maker for a little over two weeks, yet somehow we'd only made one batch. That's maybe due to the fact that the aforementioned batch turned out a little bit disastrously...For our second batch, we sought guidance from an ice cream master and purchased The Perfect Scoop, by David Lebovitz. Because we happen to have a surplus of basil (I always overbuy basil), we decided to make basil ice cream. Once we get a better handle on this ice cream thing, I think we'll start being more creative, but for now, we followed the directions to a T. And the finished product was much, much better.

List of ingredients for the ice cream:

• 1 cup packed fresh basil leaves
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 cup whole milk
• Pinch of salt
• 5 large egg yolks
• Zest of 1 lemon

First, I stuffed the basil leaves into our little food processor, added the sugar (below, left) and 1 cup of the cream, and pulsed until the leaves were ground very fine (below, right).

I scooped about half of the basil mixture into a bowl, added the second cup of cream and stirred until well combined. I plopped the other half of the basil mixture into a small saucepan (below), added the milk and the salt, and turned the burner up to medium heat to warm the liquid.

I whisked the egg yolks in a small bowl, and added a couple of ladlefuls of the warmed milk mixture to temper the yolks (below). Then I added the yolk mixture back into the saucepan.

I heated the mixture over medium heat until it had thickened (coating the back of the ladle), then attempted to use a wire mesh strainer to strain it into the cream (below). I don't think I ground the leaves fine enough, because the custard mixture just did not want to strain. I got frustrated and just dumped in into the bowl with the cream, then stirred. I placed the bowl into an ice bath (a bigger bowl halfway filled with ice and water), stirred in the lemon zest, then covered the bowl and put it in the fridge to chill.

After the custard mixture was thoroughly chilled (we waited overnight, but a good 4 hours would probably do it), we got the ice cream maker bowl out of the freezer and set up the churner. While the attachment was going on its lowest setting, we poured in the custard and let it churn for about 10-12 minutes, until the the custard had frozen into a semi-solid state (think soft-serve).

We scooped it into pint containers and let it firm up in the freezer for another 2-3 hours. The result was phenomenally addictive – refreshingly herby and mellow-ly sweet, it lasted all of a day in our freezer (although we managed to reserve 3-4 scoops for our Caprese sundae experiment). The texture was a little grittier than I think Mr. Lebovitz probably intended, due to the fact that I didn't strain the basil sufficiently (or, you know, at all), but I actually kind of liked it that way, as it gave the ice cream more basil oomph. In any event, it was good enough to get us excited about making more ice cream.

Comments

[Caitie]

I am so proud! Mmmm yum.

[SinoSoul]

Yay! congrats! if you used some coconut milk, that coulda've been "Thai" basil ice cream ;)

[Mark]

Ohh.. Thai Basil? Awesome idea. We could even literally get Thai Basil leaves from the Farmer's Market. We had some awesome Thai Iced Tea from Scoops Westside recently that was pretty inspiring. So many flavors to conquer..

- M

[Angela]

And thanks, Caitie! I was so excited for you to read this!

[Dan]

This looks awesome!

[Kristina @ spabettie]

I came here from tastespotting - WOW, this looks and sounds perfectly amazing! Basil is absolutely my favorite (my dachshund is named Basil!!), and I would love to try this!

[Angela]

Dan-

If you promise to come visit me, I'll make it specially for you! That and my awesome tomato soup that I made you try that one time.

Kristina-

Thanks so much, it was really good. And basil and daschunds are two of my very favorite things in the world (I grew up with a daschund-terrier)!