Will It Be Sous Vide? Drunken Chocolate Cherry Ice Cream
Welcome to this week’sWill It Sous Vide? , the weekly column that I usually do whatever you want with my immersion circulator.
You may have noticed that lately I have not asked you to choose topics on a sous vide basis. This is not because I don’t appreciate your input, but because I had a few topics that I wanted to tackle because they kept going up over and over again but never got enough stars to be elected. One of those topics was ice cream, and since it was supposed to get hotter than a dick within a week, I went ahead and pulled the ice trigger.
You might not think of ice cream as something to make, but if you are making an egg custard, you must prepare this base and do it carefully . This usually involves gentle heating and tempering, but sous vide lets us get rid of it all.
I, of course, am not the first one who realizes this. ChefSteps , like Anova , has an ice cream recipe for a sous video , but I wanted to see if I could take a random ice cream recipe and make it with a submersible circulation pump. I also saw no reason to settle for ice cream and decided to make a sous vide ice cream with drunk cherry and chocolate magic shell. First, let’s talk about those drunken cherries.
The sweet and syrupy cherry always nicely complements a great ice cream pile, but the rum-soaked cherry is more of my speed. As we learned from our gin and pot experiments , the immersion circulator really speeds up the entire infusion process, and you can make your own rum (or bourbon) drenched cherries in just two hours.
To make these little rum chunks, I cut pits from fresh cherries – I use a metal straw or chopstick – put them in a jar and pour some dark rum over them. Then I placed the jar in a 135 ℉ water bath and left it on for a couple of hours.
Two hours later, I had not only the rum-flavored cherries, but also the cherry-flavored rum and I was very pleased with each one individually. I put them in the refrigerator and noticed the ice cream.
Because of a minor childhood trauma, homemade ice cream has always given me a bit of anxiety. As a child, I spent most of my summer in the North Mississippi, hanging out with my grandparents and going to vacation Bible school. In addition to the Bible school on vacation, in this particular church is always arranged dinner with ice cream – not a social and dinner – my grandfather always ready peach ice cream, which everyone liked. But after a year his hair got disheveled and he decided to try himself in German chocolate. My grandmother was skeptical, and later, when my grandfather just couldn’t freeze the dough, they made a scandal, and I got anxiety about homemade ice cream.
I guess you didn’t really need this information, but it helps set the tone for how this particular sous-video experiment felt. To see if my Anova could be used to make any kind of ice cream dough – or at least one I picked at random – I decided to try Alton Brown’s chocolate ice cream because I love chocolate and thought it would go especially well. with alcoholic cherries.
First I beat half and half, egg yolks, sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder until I mixed them using a bench mixer. Then I added the cream and whipped a little more, being careful not to whip it. The whole thing was put in a bag, which I sealed and then boiled for an hour in a water bath set at 185 ℉, taking it out to shake the dough every 15 minutes or so.
I then let the bag cool on the counter for about half an hour and then put it in the refrigerator to cool overnight.
The next day, at about five in the morning, I woke up in a cold sweat, panicking that the dough was not beating. I slept restlessly for the next few hours, and then, if I could no longer put my fate aside, I took my Kitchenaid freezer bowl out of the freezer and started whipping.
After about 35 minutes, the ice cream was very soft.
In fact, the texture was somewhere between a “very thick milkshake” and a “soft serving”, and while it was delicious, it wasn’t quite the end point I was looking for, so I scooped it into a container and put it in the freezer on several hours, still feeling uncomfortable.
Fortunately, everything worked out.
Once I knew my ice cream was frozen enough, I was able to focus on the magic chocolate shell. If you have never made a magic shell at home before, know that it is very simple. All you need is good chocolate and some coconut oil .
You don’t technically need to cook this delicious sous vide filling – you can use a double boiler or microwave, but sous vide is the easiest way to get close to this. All I had to do was put my two ingredients in a bag, put it in a bath set at 115 ℉, and take it out as soon as the chocolate melted, and give it a couple of spices to make sure everyone was completely familiar.
It’s time to collect the ice cream. I scooped up the ice cream.
Then I sprinkled the shell and sprinkled it with drunk cherry. Then he ate it.
So now we have to ask ourselves: will there be a chocolate cherry ice cream drunk with sous vide ice cream?
Answer: Yes, my lovely little ones, it will be so, and I doubt that I will ever make ice cream dough on the stove again. For all my misgivings about ice cream, this was the lightest batch of frozen dairy products I have ever made, and the ice cream was all it should be: creamy, juicy, almost fluffy in texture, yet very rich.
Combine that with the surprisingly tough, rum-soaked cherries and the simplest and most protected magic shell ever created for a sous vide sundae that will satisfy your most decadent desires. Dude, I’m glad we’re finally tackling this topic, right?