Monthly Archives: June 2011

cooking, eating, equipment, food, hl, recipes, reviews

Mint ice-cream, and ice-cream machines

7 Comments

Have you ever met one of those people who looks ascance at you when you suggest having an ice-cream in winter? “But it’s 8 degrees and raining!” they exclaim. So bloody what? Ice-cream is can be the stuff that dreams are made of, so of courrrrrrrrrrse you should eat it all year round.

When I first visited Germany it was mid-winter and verrrrrrry blllloody ccccolllld. Didn’t stop me buying a Cornetto, but! (The shop owner almost did, as I learned abruptly that customers d o  n o t get to open the ice-cream cabinet for themselves.)

So here we are at the winter solstice (in the southern hemisphere). As I haven’t tried enough recipes from the ice-cream book I reviewed a few months back (Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide), and because KitchenwareDirect were nice enough to send me a new ice-cream maker to try out when they saw that I’d lost the paddle for my old one, I decided to do a flavour that straddles ideas of cold and wishes for warmer weather: mint.

Mint in any dessert can range from sophisticated and warming to sickeningly sweet and cloying. Anybody who pairs milk chocolate with mint, for instance, probably deserves very painful punishment, especially if the mint is communicated through little flavoured pieces of candy in the chocolate. Blurk. Ick. Pfahhg.

A dark chocolate is the way to go, but I don’t think you need to prefer the darkest on the spectrum – a good dark chocolate in the 50-70% range is appropriate for most applications. If you use fresh or dried mint, things get especially interesting and complex. One of the most surprising macaron flavours I did last year for Café Liaison used dried peppermint in a dark chocolate ganache. In the ice-cream here, I used fresh common mint straight from the garden.

The machine I’m now using (on the left) is a Cuisinart Ice Cream, Yoghurt & Sorbet Maker, 2-litre capacity. It’s stylish stainless steel looks aren’t quite matched by performance, as I found a full 2-litre batch didn’t freeze well enough on a warm autumn day, but it did well for a 1-litre batch in winter. (And let’s face it, probably all ice-cream maker ice-cream still kicks store-bought ice-cream out of the water!)

The mint ice-cream from the abovementioned book combines a fairly standard French-style egg custard with some sprigs of mint. The mint steeps in the cooling custard for an extended period, after which the mint is squeezed and the custard strained, the cream added, and the mixture churned. The authors’ recipe for 800ml of ice-cream used four 10cm sprigs. I upped that to five and it could possibly have been taken further.

The Cuisinart uses a rotating frozen bowl with a fixed paddle, rather than a rotating paddle inserted in a frozen bowl (as in my older Krups model, also pictured). The Cuisinart design – now quite common in ice-cream machines – seems to make for a noisier experience. I wouldn’t have wanted to be stuck in the kitchen while it churned a full mixture! Alas, the quite clever paddle (you can see it directing the flow in, out and up) is an absolute bugger when it’s time to decant the ice-cream into a container – too much surface area picking up the fresh ice-cream as you withdraw the paddle from the container, and many angled and bumpy surfaces to try to get that ice-cream off. I also found that it didn’t scrape the sides and base effectively enough while churning, leaving a 2mm layer of hard-frozen butterfat and custard (and no hard spatula is supplied to scrape it off).


The outcome was a smooth, wonderfully delicate mint ice-cream, lacking any giveaway green tinge. I had intended serving it with a chocolate sauce, but it would have been overpowering. A dusting of powdered cocoa might have done the job instead!

The next mint escapade will be with peppermint (once I’ve grown some!).

Notes about choosing an ice-cream maker: how well a machine performs is impossible to tell just by looking at it. I strongly recommend reading reviews or asking among your friends – even fancy, expensive models with their own compressor aren’t always reliable. As long as you don’t expect to make ice-cream without forethought, the common and fairly affordable machines with bowls that need to be frozen for 24 hours before making the ice-cream are a good way to go, but I do recommend making less-than-maximum sized batches in order to reduce unhappy sloppies. It’s also advisable to chill the mixture in the fridge for many hours beforehand.

In the case of the Cuisinart, the customer reviews at KitchenwareDirect are strongly positive (aside from the machine noise), but I am less positive – it does the job, but could be better. Both my now-paddleless Krups model (GVS2: highly rated on Amazon Germany) and my Mum’s 1985 Phillip’s machine (still going strong) are more effective at cleaning the sides and slightly quieter, but as Krups appliances are no longer readily available in Australia… Sniff.

My thanks to Brad at KitchenwareDirect for providing me with a new ice-cream machine.

eating, food, hl, travel

Corsica: not the easiest foodie destination

Five days in Corsica, surrounded by the azure waters of the Mediterranean, dwarfed by mountains and cliffs, eating myself full with sausage and cheese. That was the plan. The food part of it didn’t quite come together.

A common problem for holiday-destination islands (and many warm, sunny coastal areas, of course) is the tacky tourist-oriented commerce that easily overwhelms the towns and villages where tourists stay. Although Corsica isn’t the Costa Brava or the more blighted areas of the Algarve, the coastal towns clearly live off the waves of sun-seeking tourists from April to September. The culinary outcome isn’t good.

Searching eGullet for tips about food in Corsica wasn’t encouraging (it barely seems to be on the map for most eGullet members, so there wasn’t a lot to go on in the way of tips) and, unsurprisingly, Corsican cuisine is mostly about the “rustic” end of the spectrum – cheese, sausage, stews, etc. That’s more my direction of interest anyway, so I didn’t feel deterred… I just learned the names of many traditional dishes and ingredients so I could recognise them on menus.

Disappointment came, however, in the effect of masses of sun-tourists on how much real local food was easily available. In the northwest of the island there was some pitching at tourists interested in cuisine typique corse, though easily overshadowed by pizza and pasta, but as soon as we headed across the island to the southeast (lots of resorts and beaches), pizza, pizza, pizza and pasta was almost all that was left.

Starting in the north, our first lunch involved a large salad with the local fresh ewe’s/goat’s milk brocciu (similar to a smooth ricotta or Portuguese queijo fresco) and pieces of figatellu, a smoked pork and liver sausage. Dinner was civolle pienu – onions stuffed with… brocciu and prizuttu (like prosciutto), roasted, then a dish of roasted Corsican lamb (overcooked). Breakfast was a lemony cheesecake called fiadone, made with… brocciu.

We headed through the centre of the island, stopping in the major crossroad town of Corte for lunch. A central square in the old town featured numerous restaurants squarely aimed at tourists. It was a little disheartening, and despite many promoting Corsican “menus”, many of these were little more than salads (see above), omelettes with brocciu and mint, or dollops of brocciu in otherwise broadly French dishes. We were lucky to choose a restaurant with a passable “assiette Corse” or Corsican cheese and charcuterie plate. A great find, because it delivered four tasty local types of sausage (lonzu, coppa, prizuttu and one more), a terrine and a tomme-like cheese, plus a lovely fig jam. Whether any of these really displayed a Corsican “signature” flavour, however, was hard to divine. A boar stew with gnocchi was also delicious.


By the time we reached the southeast and were looking for dinner, we sensed disappointments ahead. The simple promotional slogan of cuisine typique corse was almost gone. Menus claiming Corsican dishes offered, again, salads or some pasta dishes with hints of Corsica but little more. Grilled meats and fish, or ravioli stuffed with brocciu and silverbeet are traditional dishes, but where were the various prepared meats, the boar, the stews, the chickpeas, anything using any other local cheese? Even the fancier restaurants, claiming again to be in Corsican style, displayed menus of modern French cuisine with little remarkably local input other than chestnuts and locally sourced fish and meat. For most tourists, the closest they’ll come to a diverse range of Corsican foods is the recipe postcards on sale everywhere, or the sausage stands in the supermarkets.

No doubt, the story would have been very different if we had been able to spend more time in the north and in small inland towns or villages, or visit local producers. As can be seen from these two excellent articles (Corsica Isula, NYT), there’s more to Corsica than can be readily discovered by tourists without local recommendations, staying just a few days. As a starting point, it might be easier to try this excellent book, Recipes from Corsica by Rolli Lucarotti! (BookDepository, Fishpond)

It must be said that the physical beauty of Corsica is enough to recommend the place in a flash, food or no food. I’ve written a bit more about Corsica on Duncan’s Miscellany.