French vanilla, butter pecan, chocolate deluxe...

How do I follow that?  Well, with the post that I wrote in its majority yesterday, obviously.  I would say though, that my level of cynicism for the British public's approach to food (and in fact everything) is very healthy.  The first time I went to Italy back in 1999 was in a self catering apartment in a converted farmhouse near Castel San Gimignano in Tuscany and the English family in the next apartment had brought practically the entire contents of their kitchen cupboards such was their aversion to the mere thought of eating all that weird Italian food.  Seriously.  The thing I really can't tolerate is the notion some people have of food being no more than fuel, which pains and baffles me in equal measure.  Which makes me find it strange that I don't latch emotion on to food so much, and so a large amount of my cooking is based around whim, such as making many things with impractically large quantities of egg yolks.

I'm not entirely sure whereabouts my ice cream making whim came from, but from somewhere it came.  It may have stemmed from taking Kirsty to Gelupo (the deli and gelateria side of Bocca di Lupo) the other week and managing to walk in right as they were turning out a fresh batch of pistachio gelato, which was utterly incredible. 

When I told my friend Chloe I was going to Brighton to get tattooed back in the summer she in return told me that I should go to her friend Seb's ice cream shop Boho Gelato.  Walking along a ridiculously windy seafront with one arm incredibly sore, wrapped in cling film and largely immovable and the other holding a massive ice cream cone is quite tricky, but I still did it each of the three times I went down there.  The Sea Salt Caramel was particularly good.  The taste of salt running through ice cream is a quite an unexpected one, but in this case it worked really well.

I did actually make ice cream once before, albeit absolutely ages ago (probably around fifteen years ago) and I think I may have used a recipe from my mum's Good Housekeeping Cookery Book.  I now shudder at the thought of ever using that.  I can't remember what it was I made, except that it involved ginger, and that it was actually alright, albeit with too large ice crystals.

I don't own an ice cream machine and it would be silly to just go out and buy one unless I'm going to get some kind of regular use from it (just what I need, another regular cooking practice that uses tons of egg yolks), so I asked Seb for some suggestions on how to keep the size of the ice crystals down.  He's given me a couple, one being to replace some of the sugar with liquid glucose or dextrose powder as they have a higher level of antifreeze which should keep the crystals down.  I've put this into practice in this case here.  The other involved a sort of improvised, homemade ice cream machine, which I'm quite keen to try, although if by the time I get round to doing so I've made a few more batches it may just be worth getting a machine anyway.  But I'd still like to give it a go out of curiosity.

The hideous weekend at work I'd anticipated turned out to be not so bad, so I stopped off on my way home on Saturday to get the various ingredients.  This is the sort of thing that if I've not tried before, or at least not much (like fifteen years ago, or however ages ago it was) I look around at as many sources and different recipe suggestions as possible, largely due to a lack of faith in my convictions which is then covered up with plenty of kitchen bravado.  I looked at getting on for ten or so different recipes, each with slightly different ratios of milk/cream to eggs and sugar, and some using other different ways to supposedly achieve better textures in the end result.  I briefly considered using a few of them in one amalgamated recipe, before deciding that whilst it could somehow turn out to be incredible, it would probably just end up being a bit of a disaster, or at least a let down.  In the end I've taken Thomas Keller's recipe for Cinnamon Stick Ice Cream from The French Laundry Cookbook, and adapted it slightly; namely by using liquid glucose in place of some of the sugar, and thyme in place of cinnamon.  Being an American, some of his measurements are in cups (surely the stupidest measurement ever).  Apparently a 'cup' is a rather flexible measurement that can be anything between 200ml and 284ml, so for the purpose of this I've made it 250ml. 

So, the recipe as I've adapted it.

Thyme Ice Cream

500ml whole milk
500ml double cream
150g caster sugar
2 tbsp liquid glucose
10 egg yolks
3 sprigs thyme

Combine the cream, milk and thyme in a saucepan and bring to a simmer. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse overnight, covered in the fridge.

Remove the thyme from the cream mixture and add the glucose and 50g of the sugar.  Return to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar.

Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining sugar until they have thickened slightly and lightened in colour.  Gradually whisk in one third of the hot liquid to temper the yolks.  Return the mixture to the saucepan and heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the custard thickens and coats the back of the spoon.  Pour the custard into a bowl set over ice water and stir occasionally until the custard has cooled.  (Obviously using skull and crossbones and Tottenham Hotspur ice cubes vastly improves the ice cream.)

Strain the cooled custard into a container, cover and refrigerate for at least a few hours, until cold, or overnight (for the creamiest texture).

From this point onwards, Keller's recipe says to use an ice cream machine, so I'm going with the old freeze, stir, freeze, stir, freeze method.  The freezer I'm using is pretty savage, so after an hour and a half rather than two, I whisked it in the containers with a handheld electric whisk, by which stage the outside had started to crystalise.  I gave it two further whiskings, again after another hour and a half, then after another two.  By the third whisking it had almost entirely firmed up, and the stuff around the outside did have too much crystalisation for my liking, I guess proving the ultimate fallibility of this method.

Ultimately the texture is the stumbling point.  If it were taken out of the freezer and served a few hours after the final whisking rather than staying in the freezer for the best part of 24 hours it would probably be a bit better, but I think I'm on a hiding to nothing trying to make really smooth ice cream at home without an ice cream machine.  The flavour was really good though, the amount of thyme was just right, it's not overpowering but is sufficiently in the foreground to be more instantly noticeable than the creaminess.  And it is actually very creamy.  It's the sort of ice cream that would go well with some kind of fancy dessert made with strong dark chocolate, but as there's no way I'm rustling one of those up at 10pm on a Monday I just grated some high cocoa solids dark chocolate on top.  I've got a few more flavours I want to try out, so I may deviate and try a different basic recipe.

Bacon update:
So on Saturday night I took the bacon out of its box and rinsed the excess cure mix off under a cold tap, then rubbed the surface again with a cloth soaked in malt vinegar.

In the time it was curing in the box I probably should have thought about investing in some meat hooks.  As it is I have it suspended from an elaborate string harness type thing in the cellar where it was curing.  It'll need to stay there for 5-10 days before being ready.  This is a prime example of where I go sailing blindly against the boundaries of what I'm familiar with (oh we are on a crusade against our confidences today) as I don't really have much idea of anything I should be looking out for, or how I should expect it to develop.  But now's hardly the time to be doubting or backing out of anything, so into the gusts of bravado I go, and hopefully in about a week or so I'll be making everything with bacon in.

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