The Great Ice Cream Experiment: Part One

Sure, bacon improves most things, but ice cream?! I've been wanting to make maple bacon ice cream for some time now. Call it an obsession, but it's been in the back of my head for nearly a year. Something about the saltiness of the bacon and the sweetness of the maple syrup just creates an irresistible combination. Why wouldn't this work in ice cream form? I mean, after all what is ice cream but cream and eggs + bacon and maple syrup? It sounds like the makings of a delicious breakfast, certainly.

What seemed to work the best was pan frying the bacon until almost crisp. Then, I removed all of the fat (because something tells me that chunks of fat in ice cream would not be good eats), and chopped about 4 strips of bacon as fine as I could - basically I made bacon bits. Then, I put the bacon in a small pot to warm through and crisp up, and I poured roughly 1/3 cup maple syrup over it. This boiled almost instantly and reduced making a candy-like sticky bacon-maple syrup. I whisked this into the custard, placed it in my ice cream mixer and BAM bacon-maple ice cream.

It's definitely not traditional, but again it plays on the salty-sweet food pairing, like salted caramel.

Maple Ice Cream Base

1 cup maple syrup
6 egg yolks
1 tbsp cornstarch

Whisk this together until thick and well combined.

1 1/2 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
1/2 tsp vanilla

Bring the cream to a boil in a sauce pan. Temper the eggs mixture by slowly whisking in about 1/3 of the hot cream. Once the egg mixture is warmed, add it back to the remaining cream in the sauce pan. Heat over medium low heat, stirring constantly until hot and thickened. It should coat the back of a spoon. The heating process took roughly 12-15 minutes. Don't let the mixture boil. Strain into a chilled bowl and stir to cool the mixture.

Whisk in the whole milk and the vanilla. Whisk in the bacon mixture mentioned above the recipe (ya know, if you want to go there). Chill thoroughly then freeze in your ice cream machine.



In the very near future: Curry. Bagels. Banana Bread. Cookies. Beer Ice Cream. It's going to be a fun weekend and start to the week.