Bananas Foster Ice Cream
A little banana goes a long way.
Living in the human realm, there’s inevitably going to be a lot of garbage behavior you have to learn to put up with. At times, that garbage behavior increases; at other times, it decreases. Garbage human behavior (in both the micro and the aggregate) is similar to the seasons: it comes and goes. Sometimes it’s high season, sometimes low. Or, if you prefer, it waxes and wanes like the moon. Sadly, we’re entering a period where garbage-level human behavior is most likely going to skyrocket.1
Now, in addition to the awful political landscape, I’ve also been feeling a bit under the weather this week, which has only worsened my reaction to everything that’s been happening. So I’m hoping that this batch of Bananas Foster ice cream will help dispel the cloud I’ve felt myself under for the past few days.
Traditionally, bananas foster involves cooking bananas, butter, and brown sugar in a pan and then adding alcohol—usually rum?—and igniting it with a flame so the whole thing briefly flares up in a “Wowie” sort of way. Well…we’re not going to be doing any of that here on Endless Days of Ice Cream. While I do plan on adding the alcohol (and allowing it to fully cook off), I’m just fine without setting anything on fire, thank you very much.
Anyway, this is not going to be a true banana ice cream. In keeping with how the bananas foster is traditionally served, this week’s flavor is going to be a vanilla-based ice cream with a bananas foster mix-in. Let’s start with the ice cream. Here are the ingredients:
The base is comprised of my take on the Salt & Straw recipe: 1.5 cups of milk, 1.5 cups of cream, 1/2 cup of sugar, 2 tbsps of corn syrup, and 1/4 tsp of guar gum. I also add a 1/2 tsp plus of vanilla extract for the vanilla flavor.2
I started by combining the milk, sugar, corn syrup, and guar gum, and then heating and whisking until the sugars dissolved.
After that, I combine the warmed milk mixture with the heavy cream and then add the vanilla extract. Then into the fridge to chill.
Next up, making some bananas foster. Bananas foster is the kind of mix-in I’m partial towards: you put all the ingredients in a pan and heat ‘em up. That’s it. No baking, no candy thermometers, very little chance of burning anything, etc. Easy peasy.
I used the bananas foster recipe from this blog. Thank you to my brother and sister in law for providing me with the rum called for in this recipe!
The finished product smelled amazing, so I scraped a few of the remaining bits from the pan and sampled some. It tasted delicious!
The left the base and the bananas in the fridge overnight, and churned the following morning.
Here it is churning away!
For mixing in the bananas foster, I decided to try a method recommended in Borlongan’s The World of Ice Cream. She recommends you layer half the ice cream, then add the mix-in, then layer the remaining half of the ice cream. Once you’ve done that, you freeze the whole thing for 15 minutes and remove it from the freezer to fold/swirl the whole thing 3-4 times, which completes the mix-in process.
In terms of the final results, we ate it before it was fully set, so the consistency was closer to soft serve. But how was the taste?
That right there was pure deliciousness. The bananas foster flavor came through perfectly: strong but not overpowering. I was worried (as always) that I added too much of the mix-in, but the ratio of bananas foster to ice cream was just right. The flavor reminds me of Magnolia Bakery’s Banana Pudding (which has become my go-to holiday dessert recipe over the past decade) yet uniquely its own thing. I’m looking forward to sampling it again tomorrow when the ice cream fully solidifies.
See? All it took was a little bit of ice cream to make all my troubles temporarily fade away! I highly recommend this approach for everyone during these trying times.
Note: there’s no ice cream share this week as I didn’t want to give away ice cream made by a person with cold symptoms. So we’ll resume sharing next week. As far as next week goes, some friends of the blog dropped off a bag of lemons from their lemon tree, so I’m thinking I’ll make a lemon bar-type ice cream and share it with them.
See you next week!
I’m not saying that we have to simply accept stupidity and cruelty. But there are some things we cannot change, and so we have to learn how to put up with them. For our own sake if nothing else.
And to be clear, I’m saying this for myself more than anyone else…because it ain’t easy advice to live by.
I wanted the banana flavor to come through cleanly so I didn’t want to overdo the vanilla extract.