Lemon Speculoos Ice Cream
An accidental (but happy) duplication.
The plan for this week was to make Nutella Ice Cream, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I don’t care for Nutella all that much, and it doesn’t really feel like a summer flavor. So I took to paging through my various ice cream cookbooks, looking for inspiration, and I came across Lebovitz’s recipe for Lemon Speculoos Ice Cream in The Perfect Scoop (pictured above). It seems like anytime I crack open The Perfect Scoop, I invariably land on this recipe; there must be a slight crease in the spine of the book.
To be honest, it was probably the picture more than anything else—although do I enjoy the taste of speculoos1—but lemon seemed like a great choice for a summertime flavor. And we had some extra lemons lying around. And, perhaps most importantly, I thought it would be the first lemon ice cream I made for the blog.
That last part was a mistake—I made Lemon Bar Ice Cream back in January, which I had completely forgotten about. But the two recipes are different enough, both in terms of the base and the mix-in, that it doesn’t feel like a duplication. And even if it is a partial duplication, it was an inadvertent one. I’m calling it happy accident.
The first thing I should note is that I didn’t exactly follow Lebovitz’s recipe. I took the general idea (make a lemon flavored base using lemon zest, and add speculoos) and adapted it to fit the Salt & Straw method.
I started off by zesting three lemons and then food processing them with 2/3 cup of sugar.
Once that was complete, I added the sugar to a pot and followed the Salt & Straw base process (except I used guar gum instead of xanthan). If you want a full refresher on the Salt & Straw process, you can read about it here).
The base came together very quickly. Once it was done, I let it sit in the fridge for about 6 hours before churning.
While the ice cream was churning, I got the speculoos mix-in ready. I would have gone with Biscoff cookies, but I saw some at Trader Joe’s and figured I would save myself the hassle of trying to find a package of Biscoff elsewhere.
Why did I use 49 grams? Who knows!
Here they are being mixed in during the last few minutes of churning:
And here are the final results:
Well, I certainly got the look of the ice cream right!
As far as taste, I would give it a solid B+. The lemon flavor is mild but tasty, and the speculoos pieces became cake-like in the ice cream (which was a good thing in my opinion). And the overall texture was smooth and scoopable.
That said, I would have preferred the flavor to be more lemony. It makes me wonder if in the future I should trying adding speculoos to the lemon sherbert I made for the Lemon Bar Ice Cream recipe. Might be a nice combination.
That’s it for this installment. It’s watermelon season, so next week I’ll be doing a watermelon sorbet. See you then!
As with so many flavors I’ve made this year, I was late to discovering speculoos. The first time was in my twenties, through a Biscoff cookie that was served as a complimentary snack on a flight whose destination I cannot recall.