more adventures in frozen desserts

I started out this month with a lime ice cream, my first ice cream using citrus juice, so I was interested to see how to combine the ingredients without curdling the milk. I reduced the amount of sugar by about a quarter; I haven't eaten enough of this batch to have decided whether I'd repeat that reduction in the future. I would make sure I had something other than a hand-held juicer for this one. The result was face-puckeringly tart. I recommend pairing it with graham crackers, but even then I could eat only a little of it.

Hōjicha soft-serve was a favorite of mine in Japan, and of course it isn't available where I am now, so it was on my to-make list. Some of the online recipes I found involved incorporating a strong infusion of hōjicha in hot water, while others blended "hojicha powder"—which I'd never seen before—into the base. I figured I could make "hojicha powder" from tea leaves using the spice grinder I'd bought for making pink peppercorn ice cream, and for good measure I added both the ground tea leaves and an infusion of whole leaves to my standard custard base (2 cups each whole milk and heavy cream, 1 cups sugar, 5 egg yolks), substituting a cup of the infusion for one of the cups of whole milk, IIRC. I didn't measure the tea leaves I used in either form. As you can see in the photo, the ground tea leaves didn't all dissolve into the custard, so the texture isn't as smooth as it could be, but the flavor's very nice.

The next two I made were gifts, for which inexpensive, disposable ice cream containers come in really handy. I made dulce de leche ice cream for a local friend who has taken of my cats while I was out of town. This was the first Philadelphia style (eggless) ice cream I've made, and I liked the simplicity of it. The texture was smooth and creamy, the flavor sweet and caramel-y. I would make this again, and I might experiment with adding something like cardamom (inspired by Basundi) for more complexity.

I'd been holding off on this post because I haven't yet given the raspberry sorbet (subscription-only link, sorry) I made to its recipients. But, having missed their housewarming party, I finally figured it'll be okay if they see this before they receive it. This was another first in the frozen-desserts-I've-made department in the lack of dairy, which was deliberate due to lactose intolerance. One of the keys to this recipe is the use of pectin as a stabilizer, and I'm happy with the resulting texture. (As a semi-vegetarian, I'm pleased America's Test Kitchen found pectin superior to gelatin for making sorbet.) I've never been a big fan of raspberries, and it turns out I don't love them even when I've strained out their seeds and added sugar. So I'm not disappointed to have made this as a gift, and I'm especially not disappointed that the dulce de leche ice cream uses more than one but less than two cans of dulce de leche, meaning I have leftover dulce de leche.