Cremolata, or How to Show Up One of America's Best Chefs

After a holiday hiatus, we are back in the ice cream making business. Well actually, it's not really a business, and in fact, it's not really ice cream, either. Our latest creation is a dangerously delicious almond milk cremolata, which is a frozen custard that uses almond milk instead of cream as its base.

We were first introduced to the concept of cremolata during dinner at Oleana, which I can confidently say is one of Cambridge's best restaurants. Even though a cremolata is of Italian origin, the food is Mediterranean, with a heavy Turkish influence. To be fair, it wasn't exactly love at first sight between me and the cremolata. I liked it, but the flavor was a bit too subtle for me.

In any case, we thought it might be an interesting challenge to recreate it at home. So, after a few months of procrastination, out came the ice cream maker and a quart of unsweetened almond milk, and a new recipe was born.

Coincidentally, Sortun's recipe for her cremolata is available online, but it seemed unnecessarily laborious - homemade almond milk! We opted for a store-bought version, and several scoops later, I'm not complaining. The only ingredients in her cremolata are almond milk and a smidge of sugar (hence the blandness), so I made some tweaks and additions to get a more robust flavor (see below).

The almond milk custard is simple to make, and it freezes to a delightfully custardy texture in the ice cream maker. Plus, it's low-fat. Even though I made this cremolata with an egg yolk, it could easily be omitted (perhaps in favor of more cornstarch) to make an unusually good vegan dessert.

I'm trying to think of some more tips and tricks for this, but it is pretty close to perfection just as is, perhaps with an almond biscotti or cookie on the side. If you have an ice cream maker, definitely make this. If not, buy one, and then make this. It's that good.

Almond Cremolata

2 1/2 c. unsweetened almond milk (I used Almond Breeze)
1/2 c. sugar
1 tbs. corn starch
1 egg yolk, beaten
pinch of salt
dash each of vanilla and almond extract

Mix 1/4 c. almond milk with corn starch and whisk until thoroughly combined. Heat remaining (2 1/4 c.) almond milk and sugar over low heat, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Once mixture is hot, add a bit of the liquid to the egg yolk, whisking vigorously so that it doesn't scramble (this is called tempering). Add the egg yolk mixture to the almond milk, continuing to whisk to avoid scrambling. Add cornstarch mixture, salt, and extracts, and continue stirring until mixture thickens slightly. Remove from heat, allow to cool, and refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Before freezing in an ice cream maker, strain custard through a fine-meshed sieve to get rid of any rogue lumps. It is best served right after churning, but freezes well, too.

Searching for Sherbet

With nearly a quart of leftover buttermilk in the fridge, we got thinking. You can make ice cream out of cream, milk, ricotta, and yogurt, so why not buttermilk? Some cursory internet searching made it obvious that this was not an original idea, and we quickly came upon a David Lebovitz (the reigning ice cream king) recipe for lemon buttermilk sherbet.

I have vague memories from my early childhood of recoiling at the sound of "sherbet" (though I remember it as "sherbert") because it just meant some poor imitation of its more delicious cousin, ice cream. But what exactly is sherbet? In Australia, it means beer. In England, it describes a (different) fizzy drink. Wikipedia has an entire entry entitled "Sherbet (disambiguation)." In America, sherbet can, it seems, mean anything from sorbet to ice cream. I guess we can stick with the dictionary.com definition of

A frozen dessert made primarily of fruit juice, sugar, and water, and also containing milk, egg white, or gelatin.

It couldn't be easier to prepare – the only ingredients are water, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, and buttermilk – and boasts a tart and grown-up taste. Directly out of the ice cream maker, the sherbet was delicious and refreshing, even if the texture left something to be desired after a few days in the freezer. I guess we've learned a few things about sherbet.

Honest-to-Goodness Ice Cream

If you had stopped by 20 Ellery St. a few weeks, you would have found me and Jonathan waiting anxiously, like 10-year-olds with upcoming birthdays, for the UPS guy. We startled at every faint rustling coming from the direction of the front door. We raced down the stairs at every ring of the doorbell. We almost became hysterical when, on the day that our package was supposed to arrive, the UPS guy was late and didn't make our delivery until 3pm.

What, you ask, could possibly evoke such giddy enthusiasm from two jaded and sarcastic 20-somethings? Well I'll tell you: it was an ice cream maker.

Jonathan picked out a wee Krups machine, which has a removable freezer bowl and a cute plastic churning paddle. I can't say I'm completely confident that the whole contraption will survive much longer than a few months, but as far as I'm concerned, the pure excitement surrounding its advent is worth the price (which, as you might imagine, was not very steep).

Just a couple weeks into our ice cream-making careers, we have already turned out several successful batches. Our first go was a low-fat mocha gelato, which we thickened with cornstarch instead of egg yolks, and which was speckled generously with grains of freshly-ground espresso powder. Rave reviews, although even I, the obsessive healthy-food taste rationalizer, can't say that low-fat is the same as the real thing.

We opted out of dairy for our second experiment: apple cider sorbet, made with fresh apple cider and locally-grown MacIntosh apples. The sorbet was a deep caramel color, with the unmistakeable taste of real New England apples (the best).

Next came an attempt at frozen yogurt....but we have decided that it shouldn't be spoken of again. So we'll update you when we've found a post-worthy fro-yo recipe.

Last night, though, was our crowning achievement: thick, delicious, perfectly-textured, honest-to-goodness ice cream. We made banana (flecked, of course, with a little Valrhona 70%) because we had a few ripe specimens in the kitchen. We started the egg-based custard late Friday night, chilled it overnight, and churned it to creamy perfection late yesterday afternoon. We popped it back into the freezer for a few hours (after a preliminary tasting), and it was ready to scoop and serve by dessert-time. We invited some friends over to share in our culinary joy, but most of them couldn't make it. Too bad - we had to eat it all ourselves.

More delicious pictures and anecdotes to come. But for now: