Passionfruit Ice Cream
One low-quality ingredient can really derail things.
Back at the end of February, I wrote this about the New York Knickerbockers:
I’m appreciating the Knicks this season, as they are a fun team to watch play—especially Jalen Brunson, who is endlessly fascinating to watch on the offensive end of the court. And their relative success has made me temporarily forget how awful James Dolan truly is.
But unless the return of Mitchell Robinson presages some kind of defensive reboot, and unless Thibs radically changes his coaching philosophy and plays the starters way fewer minutes, there’s no way they are beating Boston or Cleveland in a seven-game series, or staying healthy enough to even get that far.
Well, as they say, life comes at cha’ fast. I clearly underestimated the Knicks—although Boston has also clearly underperformed—and if they can manage to close out the Celtics in Game 6 tomorrow night, they’ll face the Pacers in the Conference Finals like it’s 1994 all over again.1
But no one—least of all me—is here for half-baked New York Knicks takes. I bring it up only because what I’m trying to get at here is that mistakes in life are unavoidable. And having a blog like this means some of those missteps are documented. Unlike my completely wrong Knicks take, however, I won’t need to wait three months to cop to the mistake in this week’s recipe. I’ll just come out and say it: I made an error when purchasing a key ingredient for this recipe.
The recipe itself is a mashup of two passionfruit ice cream recipes: one from Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop and one from The Ultimate Ice Cream Book by Bruce Weinstein. Both call for passionfruit pulp/puree as the flavoring agent.
I went to Monterrey Market to get some fresh passionfruit, but they didn’t have any in stock. But instead of searching for passionfruit elsewhere, or looking for frozen passionfruit puree (which I hear you can easily find), I allowed my laziness to get the better of me, which led me to purchase the Ceres passionfruit “juice blend” pictured above. This was a mistake, which I’ll explain further below, but let’s cover the process first.
The ratio here was 1.5 cups of milk, 1 cup of heavy cream, 3/4 cut passionfruit, and 3/4 cup sugar. I swapped out two tablespoons of sugar for two tablespoons of the passionfruit honey puree to up the passionfruit flavoring.
After whisking the guar gum into the sugar (a new trick I’ve been using recently), you combine everything (except the cream) in a pot and then heat it until the sugar dissolves.
It comes together very easily.
The consistency of the mixture looked a bit curdled by the end of this process (see the picture on the bottom left in the gallery above), but I hoped it would work itself out after straining the mixture into the cream and immersion blending it all to homogenize.
Thankfully, after straining and blending, the consistency looked much smoother. Into the fridge it went to chill for a few hours before churning.
I failed to get a churn video this week. So a churn photo will have to suffice.
And here’s the final result.
It tasted fine, and the texture is good. But let’s talk about the ingredient problem: the issue is that the Ceres passionfruit “juice blend” barely tastes like passionfruit. In fact, it barely tastes like anything beyond a tangy sugary flavor. There’s just not enough passionfruit flavor in it. If I had paid attention, I would have noticed this:
Pear juice is the primary ingredient. Are you shitting me?
And as you’ve likely surmised by now, the passionfruit flavor in the ice cream was just not strong enough. Sure, you can tell that it’s passionfruit ice cream, but it’s kinda like a La Croix ice cream—just a whisper of passionfruit flavor.
Lesson: when you cut corners on ingredients, you get subpar results.
If you’ve read this far, you might be thinking, why does this sound familiar? Well, it sounds familiar because a similar thing happened when I made POG sorbet. In that instance, I used a subpar passionfruit nectar, which similarly lacked the necessary flavor punch. Again, the ingredients you use matter.
Anyway, I’ll definitely make this again at some point using fresh passionfruit. The texture came out just fine and I think a passionfruit is a great flavor for ice cream.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend everyone!
Just by saying that I’ve probably jinxed the whole thing.