Who knew three simple ingredients – cream, sugar and eggs – could become the stuff dreams are made of?
Or at least, a sublime dessert.
The most popular confection on the planet – ice cream – has come a long way from the happy, but time-consuming ritual so many of us grew up with: cooking the custard to the perfect smoothness, cooling it for hours, pouring it into a frozen tin, adding the dasher and cover, layering salt and ice around it and cranking for all we were worth.
You were supposed to wait another two hours for it to ripen, but we rarely made it that long in my family, scooping it soft and fresh from the iced container, our fingers sticking to the sides, our spoons searching for the chunks of peach. It was summer in the South, and somehow, the flavor was always peach.
Nowadays, you can make ice cream as you put dinner on the table, and it will be ready for dessert. Ben & Jerry’s, that famed purveyor of funky flavors like Chunky Monkey and Phish Food, publishes recipes that require nothing more than whisking raw ingredients by hand and tossing them into an electric ice cream machine – no cooking, no cranking and very little waiting.
“I would never do a hand crank,” said Foxy Mason, a local resident and fine home cook, although she was raised with it. “Until until they came up with these electric jobs, I wouldn’t do ice cream.”
She became intrigued enough to try making it herself after visiting a friend in Mexico City who created a variety of flavors and then served them in large bowls for guests to help themselves. She’s partial to cream-based versions that feature nuts – say pistachio or butter pecan – but increasingly experiments with Italian-style ices like lemon and pineapple, heavy with flavor but light on the calories.
Sweet ices are the most traditional of all frozen desserts, dating back to the ancient Persians, who drizzled grape juice over shaved ice. While the Chinese supposedly crafted a frozen dessert from milk and rice in 200 B.C., the Arabs were the first to widely incorporate milk into their frozen concoctions. By the Middle Ages, you could find ice cream sweetened with sugar and featuring fruit and nuts from Damascus to Baghdad.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go to the Levant to get ice cream. The frozen favorite appeared in America in the early 1700s and has been gaining fans ever since. Now, a quick trip to the grocery store will avail you of every flavor from banana to yuzu.
Still, some folks prefer to do it themselves. Scott Justham received an ice cream maker as a wedding gift two years ago. He likes to make the treat as the pièce de résistance of dinner parties he hosts with his wife, Heather Johnson, crowning off a meal of say, homegrown salad greens, venison steaks and garden-picked broccoli.
An employee of the U.S. Forest Service, Justham goes to the trouble of making his own ice cream to assure himself of the quality of the ingredients and thus, the final product.
“It’s the same reason you make a nice dinner, it’s for the satisfaction of making your own food and knowing what’s in it,” he said.
A devotee of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book, which generally requires no cooking of its ice cream base, Justham reveals his flavor of the moment is chocolate peanut-butter. It shares equal time in the repertoire, however, with chocolate Baileys, his wife’s preference, a chocolate foundation laced with the Irish cream liqueur.
With summer in full swing, ice cream aficionados are looking forward to enjoying the bounty of the land in their little cup, whether it’s strawberry or cherry, or yes, peach. And to our delight, we now can get homemade ice cream without doing it ourselves.
Katie Burford compares starting her from-scratch, small-batch ice cream business to picking low hanging fruit. She left her job as this newspaper’s city editor this spring, figuring food-obsessed Durangoans, who covet all things local and organic, couldn’t resist the one thing they couldn’t get: ice cream.
And she was right. Called Cream Bean Berry, Burford’s newest enterprise is selling out of all the ice cream she makes, in original flavors like strawberry rhubarb and carrot coconut ginger. She’s expanding from her push-cart on the river trail (behind Burger King) to a permanent location in the Smiley Building. There she’ll have a commercial kitchen that can hold ice cream cakes and pints and quarts of her best-seller, salted caramel.
“Salt, sugar, fat, it hits all of those,” she said, explaining why she can’t keep it in stock.
Still, one has to wonder, what makes ice cream so indescribably wonderful? Perhaps only someone who’s never tasted it would have to ask. It bests American apple pie, Greek baklava and French éclairs. It wipes English pudding, Austrian pastries and Japanese tapioca from memory. And, you can take it with you.
Most nations in the world have some version of ice cream, whether it’s made from fruit or mung beans or cream. Fanatics swear their devotion to both flavors and purveyors. (One friend’s perennial first stop in the Eternal City is that eternal beacon of ice cream, Giolitti, for the chocolate.)
“It’s cold and it’s sweet and it’s got a lot of fat in it and your brain just goes m-m-m-m,” Mason said.
Those qualities – the cold, the cream, the sugar – are irresistible to Burford’s two young sons, who pass by all other desserts in favor of a simple cup of ice cream.
Its compelling deliciousness is one reason Ali Arnold set aside her career as an interior designer to open the local Coldstone Creamery franchise, one of the busiest in Colorado.
“One of the reasons I got into the business is ice cream always makes people happy,” she said. “It’s for a celebration.”
And who needs an occasion to celebrate? We can revel in a fine summer lunch with a cup of strawberry, an afternoon work break with a scoop of coffee and a post-concert conversation with a decadent taste of dark chocolate. We can buy it, make it, or best yet, get someone else to make it for us.
Eat ice cream – spread the happiness.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
