Ice Cream making and perseverance

There are some things in life that needs a lot of perseverance, and ice-cream making is one of them. This happy food that is so easy to find, so lovely to taste but not the easiest to make (at least for the really good ones).

Happy food should be made by happy people, but unfortunately we are human beings and we are not always jolly. We make mistakes, sometimes expensive ones like how we spent some extra bucks buying the Bulla cream thinking high fat content will give creamier results but instead we ended up with ice-cream that turned out smelling somewhat like cheese. Then at times when we are bogged down by day jobs and cannot enjoy the luxury of time to experiment, we get upset as well.

But at the end of the day, ice cream still cheers me up. And hopefully this long weekend, we'll make some cheerily good ice cream. Cos seems like even the cat wants some =)

Ice Cream making tips and tricks

We are back from our ice-cream making class! This is a community centre dessert-making class so we jumped on the opportunity to ask the teacher and other more experienced home-makers in the session for tips and tricks.

Sharing what we learnt:


General tips:

• Non-diary cream is usually preferred because it's easier to manage, on the other hand dairy cream is harder to whisk to peak form

• Cream when unopened should be kept in the freezer. Only when needed to use, move it to the fridge as this way will keep the cream fresher for longer.

Rich chocolate ice-cream:

• Use chocolate cream in addition to cocoa powder and chocolate couvertures to prevent ice-cream from becoming overly powdery (this is true!)

• Double boil instead of direct heating any mixture that may produce oil i.e. cream, coconut milk, chocolate. Reason being direct heating will cause the oil within to be purged out and you end up with an oily-smelling mixture which is no good.

• Always stir in 'oil-based' products only after mixture has cooled down e.g. Chocolate cream

Here's a look at the recipes and the recommended special ingredients

Cookies n cream ice-cream

• Coffee mate can be used to make mixture smoother and as a substitute for eggs, but result is definitely more icy than the egg recipe

• Remove cream from the Oreo cookies to avoid adding more sweetness to the mixture

• Oreo cookies need not be broken too finely, 6-8 parts per biscuit will do. Otherwise it will cause ice-cream to be overly blackish and powdery

As the class is taught the manual way, which means no ice-cream machine involved hence after the mixture is semi frozen we are supposed to 'loosen' or churn the mixture using the stand mixer. 


Below is how the cream looks and how the semi-frozen ice-cream looks...

Once mixture is churned to a chewy texture, it's done and can be placed back in the freezer for it to set in 4-5 hours. And the outcome....

We enjoyed the class very much as we learnt little tips that only experience can earn you. Now we are contemplating to attend other lessons for other ice-cream flavors and even for agar-agar and baking! 

Of course special thanks to the teacher Ms Yeo Li Li. 

Chillin team off to Ice Cream making class

This afternoon the Chillin team will be attending another ice-cream making class. We're trying to gain as much experience as we can and hopefully get some additional tips from others.

There's rich chocolate and cookies n cream ice cream on the agenda, so we're definitely looking forward to learn how to improve.

We'll be sharing more when we're back!

Mangoes!

Made a trip to the supermarket, and the fruits section greeted us with a very pleasant surprise. Mangoes are in season! Typically mangoes will be in season starting April but being fans of mangoes we can't help buy a few, in preparation to make ice cream. Oh we heard that putting apples together with mangoes can speed up the ripening process so we shall try that.

Reminds me of this fantastic mango dessert we had in Bangkok, a perfect mixture of mango ice cream, pudding and glutinous rice with coconut milk. The thought of it makes me drool already, but I hope we'll be able to make nice mango ice cream just like the one we had. That'll be sooo awesome =)

That make-me-drool mango dessert and our 3 mangoes waiting to ripen!

Cookies n Cream Ice Cream

One random day shopping at the supermarket, we decided to grab a pack of oreo biscuits as naturally cookies n cream would be the next flavour to make after we perfected the vanilla ice cream. Simple and straightforward variant, we just needed to pound the biscuits up and add them to the mixture after roughly about 20 minutes into churning.

Recipe based on our best vanilla batch - Makes 1 quart ice cream:
2 cups milk
1 cup cream
4 egg yolks
0.75 cups sugar
0.5 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 Oreo biscuits

And here's our full tub of Cookies n Cream ice cream! 

Please ignore the bubbly surface as that's due to the plastic sheet we always put before freezing to minimize formation of ice crystals on the surface.

Scooping out into one perfect round ball using our trusty zeroll scoop...

Tada! A near-perfect scoop of Cookies n Cream ice-cream by the Chillin team. Tastes pretty good, almost looks like those you get in the shop. One more oreo cookie can be added if preferred but I felt this is just right as personally I prefer a slightly less sweet option.

Now what's the next vanilla variant to make? We are open to suggestions, so do feel free to drop us a comment!

Dragon Fruit Ice Cream

Last weekend we made a day trip to Batam, visiting one of the partner's friends. Besides being amazed at how cheap their land/houses are and the huge 3 storey mansion the friend lives in...we discovered something else interesting. The friend had dragon fruits growing on his roof top! Organically grown with no pesticides or artificial fertilizers, the dragon fruits were sweet and tasty.

Many thanks to him, we brought 3 dragon fruits home and decided to keep one to make ice-cream. Because we thought it may turn out to be a great flavor, and of course it's healthy and the natural color of the fruit would make the dessert visually attractive as well.

Here's the simple recipe (improvised from a passion fruit recipe):

0.5 cups dragon fruit purée

1 cup cream

6 tablespoons milk

7 tablespoons sugar

3 large egg yolks

Pinch of salt

STEPS:

The lovely color really blew us away and the best part is this is au natural, with no artificial colouring at all.  No surprise why many ang moh chefs are amazed with this Asian fruit.

After the cream is stirred in with the purée, it was left aside in a ice bath. We proceeded to make the custard the usual way and then stirred the custard into the purée mixture before refrigeration.

The ice-cream turned out creamy, rather sticky as well which is most likely due to the original texture of the dragonfruit. Taste-wise it was a little bit on the sweet side with a sour after-taste. As it is hard to describe dragron fruit's taste, it's equally challenging to describe the ice cream! But I personally find it very unique and the old folks in the house liked it as well, just that we could scale down on the sugar. 

Definitely a flavor to watch out for in the future from the Chillin team and we hope to source for a good supply of healthy, organic dragon fruits for more experiments!

Coconut lemon gelato

After one month of experimenting, we realized ice cream making is truly a roller-coaster ride. Some days, some flavors you get it right and other days, other flavors you get it wrong. But despite the last flawed attempt at lemon sherbet, we decided to make another lemon inspired flavor. We improvised on a coconut-lime recipe in a book and made do with our leftover lemons for it.

Using simply coconut cream, lemon juice, sugar, this turned out to be a heavenly combination. Personally this is the flavor I like best so far because of the strong coconut flavor with an added tangy blast from the lemon. The zest in the mixture also gave the smooth coconut cream texture an interesting twist.

Below shows how it looks, presented nicely in a bowl by our trusty zeroll scoop...our coconut lemon gelato =)

As a result of this success, we are now inspired by coconut cream as a substitute for normal cream. So the chillin team will be scouting for more related recipes and hopefully to share more interesting flavors soon!

New Toy in the kitchen - Zeroll Ice Cream Scoop

We are extremely excited with our new toy in the kitchen, the Original Zeroll Scoop. Actually it's just me because I've always wanted this professional looking scoop because I'm simply amazed at how ice cream parlours use this with ease to scoop out perfect looking balls of ice cream. And after some research, now I uncover the mystery behind the easy scooping which is due to the scoop being made of aluminium and contains a heat conductive liquid within the handle. This helps melt the ice cream a little as you scoop.

So ta dah! 

We've gotten the 2.5oz version because this is like the best in between, not too big and not too small. Perfect for our small home productions at the moment. If you are interested to know the other sizes, feel free to drop us a message and we'll share the details. Or you can pop by to Tott or Sia Huat to check out the actual product. FYI when you see different colors at the bottom of the scoops, that actually indicates the size.

To more happy scooping!

Lemon Sherbet turned Sorbet

About a week back, we attempted an online recipe for lemon sherbet but unfortunately it didn't quite turn out as we hoped. Or rather it turned out more sorbet-ish than sherbet.

The key difference between a sherbet and sorbet is the former contains milk and is more creamy whereas the latter is simply frozen juice + sugar. Ours turned out like sorbet even though we used milk which is most likely due to proportions issue or we didn't blend the mixture well enough.

Anyway here's the outcome: Lemon sherbet turned sorbet, painstakingly scooped out (cos it's very hard). We still have some lemons left, and being relentless folks we'll definitely improvise soon!