I'm a big fan of podcasts and have been listening to How I Built This with Guy Raz. I loved the hour spent with Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams.
We made ice cream as kids with lots of rock salt, water and the old fashioned crank machine. Later on, we had an electric ice maker that made small soft batches. I was never crazy about it because you had to wait to freeze it to enjoy it. I got both of Jeni's book at the library and decided to invest in Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream At Home. Goat Cheese Ice Cream, Cucumber, Honeydew & Cayenne Frozen Yogurt, Toasted Rice Ice Cream with a whiff of Coconut and Black Tea ... they all called out to me. I made my first batch using the Cuisinart Instruction and Recipe book. It was so-so vanilla. A bit icy and not as smooth and creamy as I'd hoped. I'm a die-hard Kimball Farm ice cream girl so I don't get that excited about ice cream very often. Kimball's makes ice cream that is absolutely buttery, creamy and rich.
Today I decided to bring ice cream to a small dinner get-together tonight and wanted to use some blackberries I found cheap at Aldi's. Most recipes for blackberry ice cream use the blackberry juice - cooking it the blackberries with sugar and lemon juice and then pushing them through a sieve and getting rid of the pulp. This makes a beautiful colored ice cream but I wanted something else.
In the end, I chose Jeni's recipe for Goat Cheese Ice Cream and I'm going to serve it with a Blackberry-Honey-Thyme sauce made from some preserves I canned a few years ago. I added more sugar, two pints of fresh blackberries and boiled it into a sauce.
The ice cream is delicious, While we could have eaten it right then and there, I put it in the freezer in a container to take tonight.
Goat Cheese Ice Cream
2-2/3 cups whole milk
1 T plus 2 tsp. cornstarch
2/3 cup (or about 5 oz goat cheese - I used a 4.5 oz tub of Trader Joe's Creamy Goat Cheese)
2 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/4 tsp. fine sea salt
1-1/2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 c. light corn syrup
Mix 2 T. of the milk with cornstarch in a small bowl and make a smooth slurry. Whisk the goat cheese, cream cheese and salt together in a medium bowl until smooth.
Prepare a large bowl by filling 3/4 full of ice and covering that with water. Leave a few inches at top of the bowl. Get out two 1-gallon Ziploc bags and put one inside the other.
Cook the remaining milk, the cream, sugar and corn syrup in a saucepan. Bring to a rolling bowl over medium-high heat and boil for 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and gradually whisk in the cornstarch slurry. Bring the mixture back to a boil over medium high heat and cook, stirring constantly until slightly thickened, about 1 minute. Remove from the heat.
Whisk the hot milk mixture into the cream cheese mixture until smooth and pour it all into the inner Ziploc bag. Seal the bags and submerge into the ice bath. Let stand about 30 minutes adding more ice if necessary.
Pour the ice cream base into the canister of your ice cream maker and spin until thick and creamy. I put the timer on 1 hour.
