kerravonsen | Winter Ice Cream

Yes, it is winter, but I made a batch of ice cream this weekend anyway. I wanted to use the ginger-root which had been part of my box of assorted fruit-and-vegetables. I don't like putting ginger in savoury dishes (well, not very much) and using a whole ginger root would have been far too much. But I remembered this Ginger Ice Cream recipe which I had made note of a while back, and I thought this would be an opportunity to make it.

It was hard to judge how much ginger there was. I peeled the ginger-root and used the Bamix to mince it.

I used a mix of coconut sugar and cane-juice sugar rather than white sugar; that gave a nice added caramel flavour, and turned the mixture light brown. Brown sugar would be similar, I expect.

I used two (270ml) cans of Ayam coconut milk, which looks to be the highest quality coconut milk I've ever seen (82% coconut extract, plus water; no additives, no thickeners). Other brands are more likely to have only 50% coconut in them, with thickeners; "lite" coconut milk has even less coconut in it, and more thickeners. The Ayam coconut milk was so pure that it was coconut-cream rather than milk, and in the winter temperatures I had to thin it a bit with boiling water, because it was so thick it was practically solid. But fantastic stuff to use for ice-cream; I'd be tempted to make pure coconut ice cream with this stuff.

I made up the remaining volume of coconut milk by mixing up some Ayam powdered coconut milk, which turned out thinner than the canned version. But that was fine.

This made a thicker mixture than I'm used to with my ice cream mixes; possibly it was the coconut cream; I had left the mixture to cool in the fridge overnight. I had split it into two bits because I thought there was too much for one batch of icecream, but next time I might keep it as one batch.

I didn't add any crystalized ginger; it was plenty gingery as it was. The taste was mainly ginger, but one could taste the coconut underneath.

Need to allow plenty of time for this, as it needs to be done in stages, and left to cool. It was easier to leave it to cool overnight, so that makes it a weekend job. But a nice way of using ginger root.