ice cream notes

[radhardened]

Since my last mention of making ice cream, I've made a couple of experimental batches. The first was thyme–goat cheese ice cream. I used the same custard base as for the vanilla ice cream (2 cups each whole milk and heavy cream, 1 cups sugar, 5 egg yolks) but I steeped a bunch of whole fresh thyme in the warm milk/cream mixture for a couple of hours before adding the eggs and re-heating to thicken. Then I strained the mixture into a bowl containing four ounces of crumbled goat cheese and did the usual chilling routine. The verdict: I love the thyme, but the goat cheese didn't melt as much as I would've hoped, so I got unpleasantly solid frozen chunks of goat cheese throughout. Next time I'd either skip the goat cheese or use goat milk, as suggested by jesse_the_k.

Last week I made a batch of lavender ice cream. Same custard base as before, but this time I steeped three tablespoons of dried culinary lavender in the milk/cream mixture. Actual lavender is kind of a weird flavor—I could definitely taste the relation to rosemary. It isn't just floral, it's herbal. I didn't add any food coloring to this batch, so it turned out gray-ish. Which I can't say is terribly attractive. My usual instinct is to avoid adding food coloring, but if I were to make this again I'd probably make an exception. Overall I think this ice cream could use some kind of partner—a topping, a mix-in, an accompaniment of some kind. As I don't like this batch as much as the vanilla or thyme–goat cheese batches, though, I'm unlikely to experiment much with it in the near future beyond pairing it with a shortbread cookie or something.