Smoked ice cream and salted caramel bourbon swirl.
What’s on the Big Green Egg tonight? Smoked ice cream and salted caramel bourbon swirl. Oh my!
I need to reproduce the Smoked Ice Cream, and the Salted Caramel Bourbon Swirl, at least a couple of times before I’m confident in sharing the recipes.
However, I am blown away by how good this ice cream was. I was even surprised that when we served it both the least adventurous eater and the person who claims she “dislikes smoke” both LOVED this smoked ice cream with the salted bourbon swirl.
If you are doing your own research on making smoked ice cream before I have the final recipe ready to roll, here are some tips on how I tweaked my go to vanilla ice cream recipe to create this perfect smoked ice cream.
Tips on making smoked ice cream
I wanted to infuse the smoke flavour into the ingredients and have multiple layers of smoke flavour. That means, each ingredient I could smoke, I did smoke.
Tip 1: hot smoke your sugar and cream at medium to low heat, indirect if possible
If your sugar melts and cools into a sheet, don’t worry, it will still make a great smoked ice cream. Just break it up with your hands, a hammer or even in a grinder before you use to make your smoked iced cream.
Now, I was worried that the smoke wasn’t going to hadn’t fully infuse into the dairy to the level I’d like. Optimally I would have had smoke blowing into the cream with a smoke machine, but all I had was a Big Green Egg and ingenuity. But when you cook on a BGE, you usually use hard lump charcoal which creates smoke… so
Tip 2: put a lump of coal in your dairy
Yes, you read that right. I put a lump of hardwood charcoal into my cream as it was smoking. Think of it like making a broth from bones or influsing a herb into your tea. The warm cream pulled flavour, and not too much colour, from the charcoal. This produced an extra layer of flavour in the smoked ice cream.
Honestly, that’s it. Oh sure, I used a killed vanilla ice cream recipe as the base for the smoked ice cream, which I knew was super solid because I’d been using it for years. And the salted caramel bourbon swirl was an extra kick of flavour in the smoked ice cream. I made that with the extra smoked sugar and of course with a top-shelf bourbon.
The worst thing about this recipe is that while I got the poor video above, I didn’t get any photos of the smoked ice cream. By the time I came out to take a photo or two, the guests had realized how good it was and it was all gone!
Ooops. Guess I’d better make another batch soon!
If you find someone scaling the building to get up to your balcony it may or may not be me.
The ice cream is not stored at my house. Nor was there much left when I left it in freezer at the undisclosed location where the big green egg resides.
Nuts. I guess I can put this rope away then…