Maple Walnut Ice Cream
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Despite the prospect of living under Trump’s dirty thumb1 for the next four years, I still have a lot to be thankful for, this year and every year. Family, friends, and opportunities to enjoy many of the great things life has to offer. There’s a long list of specific things I could enumerate here. But I’ll limit myself to noting that I’m incredibly thankful for this blog and the small community of folks who read it and encourage me to keep it going. I’ve long enjoyed writing, but writing for this blog has been by far the most fun I’ve ever had writing. So thank you!
This week’s ice cream is maple walnut. Maple and walnut are each classic fall flavors in their own right, and so Thanksgiving seemed like the perfect time to churn up a batch of maple ice cream with a candied walnut mix in. The recipe is stitched together from three different sources. The primary source is David Lebovitz’s Maple Walnut Ice Cream with Wet Walnuts. But since I’m fundamentally lazy and didn’t want to make a custard, I turned to my faithful standby, Salt & Straw, and used xanthan gum and corn syrup in place of the eggs. I also borrowed a step from this House of Nash Eats recipe that I’ll describe below.
The first step was to make the maple walnut mix-in…as you might have noticed, I’m growing more comfortable with making mix-ins! I used David Lebovitz’s recipe for “wet walnuts.”
With the wet walnuts prepared, it was time to move on to making the ice cream. As I mentioned above, I used David Lebovitz’s measurements for the milk, cream, vanilla extract, and maple syrup, and swapped out the eggs in his recipe for xanthan gum and corn syrup, a la Salt & Straw. The resulting proportions were as follows: 3/4 cup of maple syrup, 1.5 cups of milk, 1.5 cups of cream, 2 tablespoons of corn syrup, 1/4 teaspoon of xanthan gum, and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract.
In terms of process, I used Salt Straw’s order for assembling the base—heat the milk and sugars, let it cool, and then add the cream. But first I had to figure out how to deal with the maple syrup. I could have added it straight in, untouched, but as I hinted at above, I decided to take a page from this recipe from the House of Nash Eats blog and started by reducing the maple syrup. I didn’t reduce it from 3/4 cup to 1/2 cup as the House of Nash Eats recipe calls for, but I let it boil for a few minutes and the syrup seemed to thicken up a bit.
Once that was out of the way, I warmed the milk, added the corn syrup and xanthan, and then transferred the mix into a plastic mixing bowl. I added in the (slightly) reduced maple syrup, vanilla extract, and heavy cream. Popped a lid on it and tossed it in the fridge overnight.
When I took it out of the fridge the next morning, I noticed tiny clumps of what appeared to be maple syrup floating on the surface of the base. I attributed this to the xanthan gum not being fully dissolved. To smooth out the mixture, I used my immersion blender to blend the base for about a minute before churning. Speaking of churning…
I chopped the wet walnuts into smaller pieces before mixing them in.
I brought this ice cream to our family Thanksgiving gathering. As soon I saw it being scooped up during the first dessert round (yes, there was more than one round, of both dinner and dessert!), I had one thought: Nailed it!
The texture and scoopability were perfect, and the taste was outstanding. A few people mentioned detecting a hint of coffee in the flavor, something I had noticed as well. Perhaps that was due to the dark grade of maple syrup I used. I’m not really sure, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter because it tasted delicious. The “wet walnut” mix in also came out great: the bits of walnut were crunchy and chewy—not at all overly frozen—and there was a good proportion of them mixed in throughout. I suppose sometimes mix-ins can elevate an ice cream! I’m glad I kept last week’s ube ice cream pure; but I’m equally glad I added them in this week.
Anyway, that’s all for this week. Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving! See you back here next week, when we’re gonna make…Horchata Ice Cream!
I’ve been thinking about Trump’s “dirty thumb” on and off since the election. The phrase comes from the opening pages of J.M. Coetzee’s memoir Summertime, where he rages against having to live under South Africa’s brutal and inhuman apartheid government. While the historical analogy is hardly equivalent, the phrase captures the waves of despair and powerlessness that have occasionally pierced me over the past few weeks.