Naomi Bossom
R E C I P E S

Honey Ice Cream

By Edward Behr

In making ice cream, honey isn’t cooked, so it retains all its fine flavor — assuming the beekeeper or honey processor didn’t heat it to begin with, in the course of eliminating crystals that would lead to granulation in the jar, as harmless as that is. (Even conscientious beekeepers do warm their honey a little, so it will flow easily into jars.) But the cold mutes flavor too, so, for instance, orange-blossom honey makes an elegant ice cream whose precise flavor is hard to identify. You might think the solution is to add more honey, but you can’t go higher than about one part honey to six of heavy cream by volume, or the ice cream won’t harden. My solution is to use the strongest-flavored honeys, such as lavender honey, lime tree honey (Tilia platyphylla or relatives; look for “tilleul” on French labels, “tiglio” on Italian), Greek thyme honey, or dark European forest honey, which has flavors of malt, nuts, and dried fruits. (Forest honey comes not from nectar but from honeydew, which is secreted by aphids and other insects living, typically, on fir trees; the bees gather the honeydew like nectar.) A satisfyingly smooth ice cream requires a machine, hand-powered or electric, and the less expensive sort that requires you to prefreeze the bowl in your freezer is perfectly adequate. The minimal combination of honey and heavy cream tends to be smooth anyway. I don’t make this as a custard-based ice cream, which also leads to smoothness, because the egg flavor is a distraction. With heavy cream, a potential problem is that some machines churn bits of butter into the mix. To minimize that, start with as cold a mixture as possible. After the ice cream is churned, put it into a regular freezer to harden fully; the faster that happens, the smoother the result.

 

3½ cups (800 ml) heavy cream

½ cup (125 ml) strong-flavored honey

 

Warm about ½ cup (125 ml) of the cream no hotter than your finger can easily stand. Add the honey and stir to combine the two completely. Then stir in the rest of the cream, and chill the mixture deeply in the refrigerator, for about 1 hour, ending with 5 to 10 minutes in the freezer.

Stir again, because the honey will have begun to settle, and freeze the mixture according to the instructions for your machine. Once the mixture is thick enough that churning requires considerably more effort — from your arm or from the electric motor — transfer the ice cream to another, covered container and into a regular freezer to complete the hardening. Makes about 1 quart (1 liter).


From The Art of Eating Cookbook

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