mix, mix… stir, stir

 Before I share the details of the two baking tangents I explored this week I will stick to the topic of this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. I have never understood the appeal of ice cream cakes, in fact, I don’t even like the term “ice cream cake” because they never seem live up to the “cake” part of the name. Granted this is billed as a torte, so I was feeling a little better, but it looked like ice cream and chocolate to me. What could be so special about that?

 When I first read through the recipe, which you can find in Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours, I was very perplexed and intrigued by the use of eggs, and a lot of them, in making chocolate ganache rather than cream. I have never come across this before and suspected the eggs must create a better texture for ganache when it is served frozen. Bingo! The bands of chocolate had a rich luscious texture and flavor that played more like a molten chocolate cake element against the ice cream layers than traditional frozen ganache ever could. I was really surprised at how much the ganache was transformed by using eggs. Additionally, the ganache delivered a rich chocolate flavor that was beyond what any layer of frozen cake sandwiched between ice cream could ever hope to.

I was so thrilled to love this dessert after expecting it to simply be ice cream and chocolate. Dorie comes through on her promise that this is a “thoroughly  grown-up rendition” of the ice cream cake. The big issue I have with other ice cream cakes is that frozen cake isn’t very tasty, soft, or moist. All the things that make cake good are lost in an ice cream cake. If the cake is actually just ice cream shaped like a cake I consider it false advertising. This ice cream torte offers bold flavors and the ganache layers have just enough textural contrast to the ice cream to be interesting yet still come across as an integrated element of the dessert.

I chose to use a Dulce de Leche ice cream and mix in toffee pieces for a bit of crunch. This is an easy recipe to make, but requires a fair amount of lead-time as each layer need to freeze before the next can be added. I think cocoa nibs mixed into the ganache layer would be an excellent crunch alternative to the toffee pieces I mixed into the ice cream.

On to my two baking tangents…pasteurizing eggs and making toffee…

I was concerned about using eight raw eggs in the ganache and the simple solution of buying pasteurized eggs at the store didn’t work out so I turned to my favorite cooking resource, Harold McGee’s book On Food and Cooking to see what I could learn. McGee states that eggs are generally considered safe from the risk of salmonella if they are held at 140 degrees F for five minutes or at 160 degrees F for one minute. His comment that egg yolks remain runny at 140 degrees F and that it was possible to eliminate salmonella in eggs to be used in yolk-based sauces had me up for some experimentation. McGee states that eggs in the shell, blended whole eggs, or separated yolks and whites can all be pasteurized by carefully heating them to a temperature between 130F and 140F, so I decided to give it a try.

I tested it first with one egg to make sure I wouldn’t end up with eight soft-cooked eggs, and sure enough, after sitting in a water bath that hovered between 135 degrees F and 140 degrees F for five minutes, it looked like any other raw egg when cracked open. The temperature of the egg once cracked open wasn’t in the 135-140 range so I decided to let the others have a longer bath in the warm water. I set eight eggs in the pan of 140 degree F water for fifteen minutes and applied more heat if the water temperature dropped to 135, so I could maintain the range between 135 and 140 for the entire fifteen minutes. When I cracked the eggs open there were a few small spots of white that had turned opaque, but still easily mixed into the ganache with no problems. The internal temperature of the eggs was 127-128 degrees F, so I don’t know that I successfully pasteurized my raw eggs, but I gave it a good try. In retrospect, I should have cracked the eggs into a bowl and set that in the water so I could stir and monitor the temperature of the eggs directly. Next time.

The other tangent I explored is making toffee. I love English Toffee, but have never made it. After reading many different recipes on line, I got on with melting sugar and butter very excited to soon have my very own toffee. Disaster strikes as the sugar begins to separate from the melted butter. I stir and stir, but soon realize they are not going to come together. I re-read many online recipes and everyone seems to be successful simply melting butter and sugar together, hum. Second try, again a clump of sugar sitting in a pool of clarified butter. I am no stranger to sugar work and making caramel, so by this time I was really irritated that I can’t get this to work. Next attempt includes a bit of water and some corn syrup - success! Well, moderate success in that I didn’t caramelize it enough for my taste. You can see in the photo the toffee garnish is a bit blond.

This got me thinking, why couldn’t I caramelize sugar the way I would for caramel and then just add butter? I was able to take the sugar nice and dark, stirred in the butter and things were looking good. A bit more stirring and it all started to separate again, argh! Maybe the 1:1 ratio of butter to sugar was too high, so I started sprinkling in more sugar and what do you know, it came back together! Success was mine, now a bit of salt because there is nothing better than caramel and salt. Beautiful. A touch of vanilla out of habit and yikes, the mixture begins to separate again. I quickly put it back over the heat and stir like crazy and managed to salvage what turned out to be a beautiful dark caramel toffee.

I still don’t know what was going on with my first attempts that separated into an oily mess, but I really like the method of caramelizing the sugar dry and then adding butter. I will work out the details of proportions and get a toffee recipe posted soon!

Thank you to Amy of Food, Family, and Fun for selecting this weeks recipe that changed my opinion of ice cream cakes and inspired some very interesting tangents that I enjoyed exploring.

photo by David Peterman

Ice cream with no eggs. How interesting and potentially convenient for the times when I don’t want six or nine egg whites left over and challenging me to do something clever with them.

Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream is the pick of the week by Dolores of Culinary Curiosity for Tuesdays with Dorie. I added a bit of a flavor twist by infusing the milk with some fresh lemon thyme for about fifteen minutes. The lemony herby notes played in the background against the tangy sour cream and blueberries really well. Lemon verbena would also be great with this ice cream. The sour cream flavor was very prominent and really delicious. Surprisingly, when I added the chocolate sauce the blueberry flavor came forward.

Though I was very pleased with the flavor and color of this ice cream, I wasn’t so wild about the texture. I missed the creaminess from the eggs. It was more crystallized and melted in the mouth in a different way than egg-based ice cream. I would make this again if I needed an egg-free ice cream, but I am more interested in trying to find a perfect balance between some sour cream and a few eggs because I loved the flavor of the sour cream with the blueberries.

I have always frozen spare egg whites for future use, but been perplexed over what to do with spare egg yolks. Over the years I have made attempts to freeze yolks and they just never thaw correctly. I was always left with gummy, pasty, yellow balls of goo that were clearly ready to cause catastrophe to any recipe I dared use them in.

While flipping through Harold McGee’s book, On Food and Cooking, I came across a great bit of information. Firstly, he confirms what I discovered, that yolks frozen directly and thawed results in a pasty consistency that does not readily combine with other ingredients. Being the smart food science guy that he is, he provides a solution!

Mixing yolks with either salt, sugar, or acid solves the problem. He recommends mixing 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of sugar, or 4 tablespoons of lemon juice per pint of whole eggs or egg yolks. One large U.S. egg is equivalent to 3 Tablespoons and an egg yolk is equivalent to 1 tablespoon. I was working on a much smaller scale and just for simplicity sake I did some rounding and for six egg yolks mixed in 1 teaspoon of sugar and it worked great.

I no longer feel the need to make ice cream every time I make an angle food cake, meringue, or marshmallows. It’s a whole new world!

photo by David Peterman

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking task selected by Ashlee of A Year in the Kitchen found me, unfortunately, short of such luck at the store and a bit short on time for baking-worthy ripeness to develop on my bananas, I proceeded none-the-less. Despite not having the perfect banana situation I managed to make some very tasty banana bread. What made this recipe delicious and unique is the addition of nutmeg. What is so lovely and surprising is the nutmeg hangs back letting you experience the chocolate and banana flavors before revealing itself. It is such a delightful bloom of flavor at the finish of each bite.

I found the chocolate portion of the bread less interesting. I suspect if I had a stronger banana flavor from truly ripe bananas, the chocolate flavor would have been better balanced and integrated with the banana flavor in a more interesting way. Either way I found myself coming back for more.