Ancho Chili Pepper Jelly (makes 6 cups)

6 ancho chilis, dried (4 oz)

1 quart boiling water

1 lemon, juice

4 chipotle peppers, (in can), seeded

1/4 cups adobo sauce (can use sauce from canned chipotles)

3 cups sugar

1 2/3 cups apple cider vinegar

1 3-ounce package of liquid pectin

1. Cover ancho chilis with the boiling water in a bowl and let soften for 30 minutes.  Drain, reserving 1 cup of the liquid.  Seed the peppers. Puree in a food processor with the reserved liquid.  Strain through a fine colander.

2. Puree chipotle peppers and adobo sauce.  Strain and add to ancho chilis.

3. In a large dutch oven or heavy bottomed non-reactive pan, heat the lemon juice, sugar and vinegar.  Bring to a boil while stirring, until sugar is completely dissolved. Boil for five minutes.

4. Add chili purees and boil for a minute. Add pectin and let boil for another minute, according to package instructions.

5. Pour into cleaned and prepped jars. Seal and cool.

Chocolate Ice Cream (makes a small quart)

Adapted from Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones

5 egg yolks

3/4 cups sugar, split in two halves

1/4 c. Dutch processed cocoa powder (worth the search; if    you can’t find it, natural cocoa powder will do, but dutch processed is a much richer chocolate flavor)

1 cup whole milk

1 3/4 cups heavy cream

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.  In a medium heatproof bowl, whisk eggs to break yolk, then whisk in 6 tablespoons of the sugar.

2. In a heavy stainless steel saucepan, combine the cocoa powder and remaining 6 tablespoons sugar. Whisk in about 1/4 cups milk to make a paste, stirring to make it smooth. (Dumping the milk in all at once will create lumps! No one likes lumps!) Whisk as you slowly add the rest of the milk, cream, and salt.  Heat over medium-high; take off heat when it just approaches a simmer.

3. Scoop out about half of the hot liquid mixture to use to temper the egg yolks.  While constantly whisking the eggs, slowly add the hot liquid.  Repeat with more of the hot cream mixture, constantly whisking.

4. While stirring the remaining hot cream still on the stove, pour in the egg+cream mixture from the bowl into the pan.

Thickening the chocolate base

5.  Put pan back over a medium heat, stirring constantly, until it is thickened.  This happens quickly, no more than a couple minutes. This is a good time to use a thermometer to monitor the temperature of the mixture.  You want to reach 160 degrees, but no hotter than 170 degrees (chocolate scrambled eggs). If you don’t have a thermometer, just watch carefully for the moment when the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of the spatula (if you run your finger down the spatula, the remaining mixture doesn’t run into the clean area).

6.  Strain the mixture into a clean heatproof bowl or ziploc baggie. Immerse container in an ice water bath. Chill until the mixture is cold.

7.  Add the vanilla.  Freeze the mixture in your ice cream maker according to its instructions.

8.  Layer the jelly and ice cream- work quickly and use the jelly more sparingly than you would with other mix-ins- it packs a punch!  Start with a layer of jelly at the bottom, spoon in some ice cream, then more jelly, then ice cream, etc.  Stop with a layer of ice cream.  Press a piece of parchment across the top to prevent freezer burn, put on your lid, and freeze in the coldest part of your freezer for at least two hours.

Start by layering the jelly on the bottom

Layered ice cream and chili jelly

Candy Cane Bark Supplies.

It is common to find pepper mint flavored ice creams, but it’s much more difficult to harness that combination of sugar and mint that makes up the red and white stripped canes. What happens if you infuse candy canes in milk and cream? How does that affect the sugar content of the ice cream?  What do candy cane scrambled eggs taste like if you accidentally over cook the custard? These were all things we found out in our festive holiday experiment!

Candy Cane Bark Ice Cream

(yields a generous pint- double if you want a quart)

1 cup milk

1 cup heavy cream

5 candy canes

3 egg yolks

4 1/2 tablespoon sugar

a handful of dark chocolate chips and white chocolate chips

optional 1 teaspoon peppermint extract

special equipment: candy thermometer

1.  Pour milk and cream into a resealable jar with three candy canes. Let soak overnight. The candy canes will melt overnight.

Candy Cane infused Milk. 

2. Crush the remaining two candy canes, chocolate and white chocolate chips.

Crushing Candy Canes. 

3. Heat the dairy in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat until it comes to a boil.  Stir to make sure it doesn’t scorch.

4. Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks and sugar in a medium heatproof bowl until they are smoothly mixed.

5. While whisking, pour a third of the hot milk into the eggs to temper the eggs.  Continue whisking and pour the rest of the hot milk into the eggs.  Keep whisking, pour mixture back into the saucepan and put over medium heat.

Tempering Egg Yolks.

6. Heat until the mixture reaches at least 170 degrees but no more than 180 degrees.  This happens very quickly, almost instantaneously, with the pint size recipe.  Do not overcook- otherwise you’ll end up with peppermint scrambled eggs!

7. Strain mixture into a plastic ziplock and cool in an icebath. Or, strain into a large bowl, cover, and refrigerate for a couple hours.  Once the mixture is cool, pour into the ice cream maker and freeze to manufacturers instructions.  If you want to add peppermint extract, this is where to do it.  I didn’t do any extract, and it came out plenty pepperminty.

8. When the ice cream starts forming and is fluffy, add the crushed candy and churn for just a couple additional minutes so it is fully mixed.

9. Pour into a container, press a piece of parchment paper into the top to prevent freezer burn, and freeze in coldest part of your freezer for a couple hours before enjoying.

Side Profile of the Candy Cane Bark Ice Cream.

This festive flavor is the perfect thing to pair with anything chocolate. We highly recommend pairing it with some of Dorie Greenspan’s World Peace Cookies (which is published on Smitten Kitchen’s website), brownies, or devouring it on its own.

Scopes of Candy Cane Bark Ice Cream. 

We are getting this up today so that if you want to try this delicious Ice Cream Eaters Original for Christmas you have a day or two to run out and get ingredients (but most likely you have a lot of this in your house right now from baking cookies!).

But also remember…this makes a great New Years recipe too!  You might very well have a whole bunch of candy canes hanging on your tree, and this is the perfect way to get rid of them!  No one wants to be eating year old candy canes next Christmas.

Happy Holidays from The Ice Cream Eaters.  See you in 2013!

As the hosts for a large Thanksgiving gathering this year, we felt responsible to provide as much delicious food as possible.  And second to a turkey, the most important part of any Thanksgiving meal is the pie.  If pie is the equivalent dessert to turkey, then ice cream is the equivalent to gravy.

Maple Ice Cream atop Pecan Pie

We decided to branch out from our usual pumpkin pie and made Dorie Greenspan’s Pecan Pie (it has chocolate chunks and espresso!).  To pair, we thought a seasonally appropriate choice was a Maple Ice Cream.

The maple syrup is boiled to reduce the water content and concentrate the flavor.  Use Grade B, which is darker and has a deeper maple flavor than Grade A syrup.  We used a small batch syrup that is sold in a specialty grocery nearby, but if you are near a farmer’s market in the NE, there may be a local-ish farmer selling his own maple syrup.

Reducing the maple syrup

We had a great response from our Thanksgiving guests (one of our Canadian friends said it was just like his homeland calling). Another friend made an impromptu ice cream float, putting a scoop into his beer glass filled with Brooklyn Black Ops, a Russian Imperial Stout aged in bourbon barrels.   We also suggest a scoop on pancakes, waffles, or french toast.

I took the recipe for Maple Ice Cream straight from Jenni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home.  We didn’t feel right just posting the recipe because we didn’t change it a bit, so I’m linking to some bloggers that used her recipe and took some nice photos of the process.  We didn’t use any nuts in the ice cream because we paired it with pecan pie, but do what tastes right for you.

Our Christmas recipe will be up next week, just in time for the holiday, in case you want to try it out!

Our Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream with Caramel “Chunks”

Things have been quiet over here.  Our ice cream making has been on hiatus this summer as we packed and moved into a new apartment (with a bigger kitchen and plenty of freezer space in the basement!).  While we have not been making ice cream, we have indulged in some frozen delights, which inspired the flavor we made recently.

One of our favorite store bought flavors is caramel.  I’ll eat the pints easily found at any deli – Haagen- Dazs Caramel Cone or a Ben and Jerry’s Karamel Sutra, but I’m game for anything that has a caramel component.  Local ice cream company Steve’s makes really great ice cream, sorbet, and vegan ice creams.  (We ate half a pint of their Cinnamon Coffee before realizing it was made with coconut milk).  However, their Salty Caramel is just a tad too salty for our tastes.  Their caramel is a great texture, with thin ribbons racing through a light caramel ice cream, but the salt is the primary flavor.  However, if you see their ice cream in a freezer near you, definitely grab one of their other flavors, especially the Brooklyn Blackout or Mexican Chili Chocolate.

In my opinion, the winner in the caramel ice cream race is clearly Talenti‘s Sea Salt Caramel gelato.  The gelato is creamy and dense, with the perfect melting point.  Distributed throughout are chocolate covered caramel truffles, made with Fleur de sel.

Tom finally put his foot down and said that we couldn’t buy it anymore- we had to make it.  So I tracked down a recipe from a very reliable source on the internet.  David Lebovitz, author of The Perfect Scoop,  runs a great cooking blog.

We made his Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream, following his recipe to the tee, minus the caramel praline, which was a total kitchen fail.

Some of the main caramel components measured out

Melting the butter into the melted and browned sugar

The failed, burnt caramel praline

Since the caramel praline did not work out we surfed Mr. Lebovitz’s site a bit more, and found his recipe for Salted Butter Caramels. We wanted to have some sort of chunk in our ice cream and this seemed like the perfect solution.

We followed the recipe as closely as we could without having a candy thermometer.  The cooking of the candy went smoothly, and I just made a guess to when I hit the proper temperature after I maxed out my meat thermometer at 220 degrees Fahrenheit.  The only problem we had was that after the caramel hardened it was extremely difficult to pull off the tinfoil.  We highly recommend using silicone mats or parchment paper to let the caramel harden on. The caramels are soft and chewy at room temperature, but harden into a crunch deliciousness in the ice cream.  We were hoping for a chewy caramel, but our results were surely tasty.

Caramel “chunks”

Because he is a great recipe writer himself, we are simply linking to his recipe, with our sage words of wisdom- caramel is tricky.  Do not look away.  Also, a candy thermometer would have been really helpful- so get one before you embark on this recipe!

Hint: This flavor pairs well with grilled peaches or nectarines.

We are not sure how many of our readers are based here in New York City, but if you are there is an interesting little event happening tonight (Tuesday July 24th) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  The Masters of Social Gastronomy meeting is happening at Public Assembly, and this time the topic is Ice Cream:

Everyone’s favorite summer treat comes to the forefront at this month’s MSG.

Sarah Lohman of Four Pounds Flour will unearth the stories behind our favorite ice cream treats and share some of history’s wildest bygone flavors—that may be due for a revival. By the end of the night, you’ll be able to answer questions like: which came first, chocolate or vanilla? The ice cream sandwich or the ice cream cone? Neapolitan or liquid nitrogen?

Meanwhile, Soma will show you the science behind making the perfect batch at home, and Big Ice Cream’s tricks for plumping up their profit margins. We’ll also track frozen desserts across the globe, from Italian gelato to dondurma, the magically stretchy ice cream from Turkey.

At the storytime halftime show, they’ll make ice cream right before your eyes, using an easy method you can replicate anytime, anywhere.

As always, MSG is free and takes place at Public Assembly (70 North 6th Street) in Williamsburg. Doors open at 7pm, with samples and drink specials all night long.

RSVP here!  // Follow MSG on Tumblr

In other Ice Cream news…

Pint size dumb bells at Tom Sachs: SPACE PROGRAM: MARS

If you are not following Serious eats you may or may not know that July is Ice Cream Month.  Serious Eats has had countless posts about Ice Cream all over our fine country, including an interview with Doug Quint of our beloved soft-serve shop, Big Gay Ice Cream.

Carrot Cake from the Milk Bar Cookbook.

We have been busy with other things this month, and are very sorry to deprive you of new recipes.  These things included Kira showing off her baking talent by making Tom Momofuku’s Carrot Cake for his birthday (from scratch!).  We are working out a dairy free recipe that will be hitting the blog soon, but in the mean time we had a couple questions for you:

What do you think of beer in ice cream?  Or beer ice cream floats?

What is your favorite place to get a frozen treat this summer?

Do you have a favorite place to get spumoni ice cream? Tom used to eat this often as a child, but he would only scoop out the chocolate and cherry.  We want to eat this in New York. Tell us where to go!