Dri Dri Gelato

Ice cream is surely one of life's great pleasures, when I was a child the height of frozen luxury was a cornetto - though sadly it was more likely to be a choc ice covered with something not very like chocolate and filled with a virulent yellow something (still seemed good). The great lost ice cream of childhood was something shaped like Dracula, it was bright red, probably horrible, and what we got from the village shop - which sold vanilla (again lurid yellow) chocolate and strawberry ice cream. Once they did pineapple which was unconvincing. All this was a long time before Ben and Jerry's hit the country or before ice cream makers were a common kitchen gadget.

I'm very fond of my Ice cream maker - it's not, as I may have mentioned before, a very sophisticated model but it churns and freezes enough to make a very passable product once it's had a few extra hours in the actual freezer and there's the added bonus that you know exactly what's gone into it. Recipes are fairly ubiquitous now too - most general cookbooks will have a few (Sarah Raven's have proved to be particularly good) and there are quite a few dedicated volumes out there but very few of them have looked like they'd make the ice cream I love (to many egg yolks, I don't want frozen custard and that's the flavour I've found comes through). 'Dri Dri Gelato' is the best book I've found so far although I find I'm making alterations to the recipes - this may be down to my ice cream maker as much as to personal taste, and is a little bit effected by what I have in the kitchen. 

The great thing about this book is that the quantities are small - they pessimistically suggest they'll feed 4, those must be for 4 people can put away an almost epic amount of ice cream, but still it's a quantity that fits neatly into my mixer. So far I've tried the vanilla and chocolate, both have been excellent. There are sorbet's that look good (just wait until strawberries and raspberries are cheap and plentiful) and although at the moment I'm not quite sure what the point of Granita is I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and try it sometime soon.

This is the chocolate ice cream I made, I like it, my mother liked it, and the blond liked it - it has only a passing relationship with the original recipe and is most decidedly ice cream rather than gelato...

Chocolate Ice Cream

12 floz (375mls) whole milk

8 floz (250mls) double cream

25g dark chocolate

140g caster sugar

2 egg whites

80g unsweetened cocoa powder

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Gently heat the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water until it melts, add the sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, and egg whites and beat until it forms soft peaks (or at least isn't a solid lump) slowly add the milk and cream until you have a nice smooth liquid. Churn until you either get ice cream because you've got a lovely posh effective mixer, or for about 40 minutes when you'll have a reasonably thick mix which will want a few extra hours in the freezer. Best eaten within a week of making. 

Should have made notes

In the early 80's my sister and I used to go and stay with our mother in Edinburgh. it was the first place I saw a film in a proper cinema, was taken to the theatre, saw a ballet, ate French bread, and had really good ice cream. Scotland doesn't do badly for gelato - even Aberdeen had Casa Marchini (they sold wonderful ice cream and were really the high point of my second year at university when I lived just down the road from them). The love affair with gelato continued when mum and made a trip round Italy, ostensibly I was there to look at as much art as I could see in a week but it turned into an ice cream eating marathon (especially in Venice where between us we ate an epic amount of the stuff) but since that trip I've searched in vain for something even close.

You can buy excellent ice cream from any supermarket these days but I've yet to find a anything like a satisfactory vanilla gelato that would transport me back to Edinburgh aged 9 eating the best ice cream sundae I'll ever have. Well if you can't buy it you can try and make it so ever since I got an ice cream maker a couple of years ago I've been looking for a recipe that will approximate the taste I remember - it's been surprisingly difficult. Most recipes I've found are based on a custard which is clearly not the place to start (I like custard, quite possibly more than the next person, but I don't care for it frozen) anyway long story short I bought the 'Dri Dri Gelato' book a couple of weeks ago - it looked promising - and started experimenting.

My first attempt at their vanilla was tasty but wrong (my ice cream maker is a small domestic beast and could not cope, nor was it fair to expect it to, with the still really quite warm liquid that the book assured me was ready to be churned). Also 4 vanilla pods is possibly excessive, the magical ice cream of childhood was without vanilla seeds and still very good so I felt it should be possible to recreate it without taking out a second mortgage. Finally the frozen texture of the Dri Dri version just wasn't quite right - and though they recommend eating it straight out the churn mine wasn't going to make it firm enough...

The second attempt however is divine, I used a bit less milk and a bit more cream. I didn't bother at all with vanilla pods going for extract instead, and as I added it to the churn rather than when I was heating the milk and cream the result (that I hadn't thought through) is that the very small amount of alcohol has stopped the gelato from freezing rock hard. I also cut down the sugar slightly. What I didn't do was accurately measure the amount of milk or cream I used. or vanilla extract. This is a massive fail, and whilst I've learnt my lesson regarding note taking, I will just have to hope I can recreate (and share) the magic. Meanwhile I've got a small amount of very good ice cream (not for sharing) and hope! There will be more about the gelato book when I've tried more recipes.  

Lavender and Honey ice cream

Sunday’s when I’m on my own are meant to be about housework but generally tend to be about cooking (if I get domestic at all). Today has been all about cooking – as was last night sort of, partly in an attempt to avoid the twin evils of football and big brother.

After my foray into ice cream making a couple of weeks back a friend asked me if I had a recipe for a lavender and honey version. It felt a bit like serendipity because I’d been eyeing up just such a thing in Sarah Raven’s ‘Garden Cookbook’ and as another egg free ice cream (but this time with the exciting addition of condensed milk) there seemed no better time than to give it a go. I added some nutmeg because I once had an ice cream at a national trust place that was inspired by Elizabethan herb gardens or some such – the point being it was very nice and the nutmeg was a nod in its direction.

I’ll be honest I’m not entirely sure about the flavour; I think it needs to go with something. I’ve made the apple pudding cake again because it seems like a likely contender and not a bad accompaniment to Sunday night viewing either. The best way I can think to describe the flavour of lavender (apart from saying it tastes like it smells) is of a slightly smoky floral tea. I like cooking with it, love lavender jelly in particular, and indeed as the Scottish one and other unwilling guinea pigs will testify I’ll slip a few flowers into food on the slimmest of pretexts...

Flavour aside (and it’s becoming an acquired taste) the texture of this ice cream is amazing and absolutely worth making so this is it as I made it (for most likely better results see the Sarah Raven book – it’s well worth having)

(Quantities are for my ice cream machine which is small)

300ml whole milk

2 tablespoons honey

4-6 stalks and heads of lavender

1 vanilla pod split

Pinch of salt

125ml condensed milk

300ml double cream

A good grating of nutmeg (very optional)



Heat the milk with the honey, lavender flowers, and vanilla pod until just below boiling. Take off the heat and allow to cool completely, then poor through a sieve to remove the lavender and Vanilla, then chill for half an hour in the fridge.

Add the salt, condensed milk, and cream, mix thoroughly then poor into an ice cream maker and churn for 20 minutes. (if you don’t have an ice cream maker it goes straight into the freezer and needs to be stirred every half an hour for a couple of hours)

Put into a container and freeze for a minimum of 4 hours but better yet at least over night...

And finally a picture of some Morris dancers – dancing outside my sister’s house last week, a very entertaining evening which could only have been improved with the addition of ice cream.

Sarah Raven's Food for Friends and Family

It has been an unremittingly grey and gloomy day – not the thing at all for the 1st of June and the sort of day that calls for something cheering at the end of it. My quest for cheeriness took me straight to Sarah Raven’s new book –‘Food for Friends and Family’, published by Bloomsbury just (I like to think) to help me through days like today. (As a bit of an aside I’m carrying something of a torch for Bloomsbury at the moment, I love this book and I am unbelievably excited about the upcoming ‘Hedgerow’ river cottage handbook – and that’s only the tip of the books to daydream over iceberg.)

And talking of daydreams – how much do I want Sarah Raven’s lifestyle? Well quite a lot really which is probably pretty clear to anyone who follows this blog. Not just a gardener, but a gardener with a sitting tenancy of Sissinghurst, a place I find unbelievably magical (and I have just a little crush on Vita Sackville-West). Her husband owns a handful of Scottish Islands (I like those too) and she’s an inspirational sort of cook. (Even my blonde friend felt inspired and she hates cooking.)

There is a particular satisfaction in being able to open a recipe book and think ‘yes, no problem – I can do that’, an even bigger satisfaction in not being able to resist starting on something straight away. The first recipe I’ve tried from ‘Food for Friends and Family’ had to wait 24 hours though – it was Strawberry and Basil ice cream and the ice cream maker had to go in the freezer first.

This ice cream recipe, ahh, it’s not just an ice cream recipe, it’s the one I’ve been waiting for, the one that’s made me think of Sarah Raven as my friend and ally in the kitchen, it’s also the recipe that’s stopped my ‘hmmph it’s okay for her attitude (envy – it’s not pretty, but it’s true). I love to cook, and once I’ve got something down pat I’ll experiment a bit with it, but I’m the sort of cook who needs instructions. I don’t in the least trust the ‘Oh I just chuck in a bit of this and a bit of that and never measure anything’ approach. When I cook like that everything tastes the same and it gets dull pretty quickly, plus I never learn anything. This is just one of the reasons for a medium large collection of cook books.

My issue with ice cream is that every recipe I’ve found up until now has involved eggs, specifically egg yolks, so every ice cream I’ve made has tasted like custard. I’m sure if I’d have looked properly I would have found one I liked earlier, but another of the pleasures in a new cookbook is that previously overlooked ideas suddenly jump out of a new format. This strawberry and Basil wonder is a very simple (and amazing coloured) mix of fruit, cream, basil and sugar. The Basil makes the Strawberry flavour really sing – I loved it, the blonde loved it, and the Scottish one – well he loved it till he noticed the green bits at which point he accused me of trying to poison him with mint (there was an incident with some new potato’s – he’s not allergic or anything but I now know he doesn’t like mint added to things. Oh how I know it.) Assurances that it wasn’t mint came too late and I ended up eating the rest myself.

Next I plan to introduce some Rosemary Cherry scones and see how those go down. The rosemary won’t be visible so I might just get away with it... and I have to get some rose geranium for jam making, and lemon curd cup cakes sound wonderful, oh and pea pesto – got to make that too, and well, you probably get the idea. This is a delightful book, times better than many I’ve seen come out this year and really, really, worth a look.