Recipe 17: Pink Panther Ice Cream

Alternative Title: Troubleshooting with Ice Cream

Monday, April 6, 2015

This week was a bit of a mess as far as ice cream went.  If you checked my Upcoming and Past Flavors page, you’ll have seen that I was supposed to do a Mango Ice Cream.  Unfortunately, the price of mangoes doubled by the time I went to buy them, and I didn’t want to pay $2.49 per mango.  That seemed outrageous.  But, being the brilliant fellow that I am, I didn’t discover this until Saturday evening which basically meant that if I wanted to stay on track ice cream-wise I had to find a new recipe tonight.  And I did.  It was Pink Panther Ice Cream from Scoop Adventures: The Best Ice Cream of the 50 States by Lindsay Clendaniel of Scoop Adventures.

Pink Panther Ice Cream seemed like a lovely recipe and a wonderful addition to our Easter spread the next day.  It had plenty of fruit, a dash of alcohol, and a beautiful shade.  Unfortunately, it also had crème de cassis: black currant liquor.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find crème de cassis on a Saturday night in Kentucky?  No one knows what it is, not even people who have worked with alcohol their entire lives.  Grocery stores don’t carry it, and local liquor stores don’t carry it.  I suppose that’s why God invented Liquor Barns, the end result of a bunch of rednecks shooting down a spaceship and filling it with alcohol.  But bless them because Liquor Barn had one bottle of crème de cassis.

Unfortunately, that was not the end of my ice cream woes.  I’m not fully satisfied with this recipe.  Like my Margarita Ice Cream recipe some time ago, it leaves a sort of waxy, filmy taste on the back of your tongue.  Initially, I’d thought the powdered sugar in the Margarita Ice Cream had done that, but Pink Panther Ice Cream doesn’t have any powdered sugar in it.  So what could the problem be?

Butterfat.

Thanks to the wonderful people at Ice Cream Geek, I’ve learned that one of the biggest factors in an ice cream’s texture is the amount of butterfat (the fatty part of the milk) that’s in it and that when you have too much butterfat, it leaves a weird, waxy taste on the back of your tongue.  The author of the article “Butterfat and Ice Cream” was also kind enough to create an Ice Cream Butterfat Calculator for public use.  How much butterfat does this Pink Panther Ice Cream Recipe have?  19%, quite a bit above the 10% -- 16% that ice cream usually has (And for your information, Margarita Ice Cream has 28.9% butterfat – no wonder I couldn’t get rid of that waxy taste!).

There are a few things I can do to change this, the easiest being switching ingredients.  Whole milk only has 3.5% butterfat so switching around the proportions of heavy whipping cream and whole milk should give me less butterfat but still maintain the taste and texture.  However, in doing so I might create a lot of ice crystals since this recipe only uses milk and heavy whipping cream as emulsifiers – and comes with alcohol, which makes it harder to freeze, as well as fruit, which is naturally icy.  Perfecting this recipe will probably take quite a bit of trial and error.

However, its butterfat content wasn’t the last of my issues with this recipe.  I personally thought the dairy component overwhelmed the somewhat delicate fruity flavors and diminished the ice cream’s refreshing quality.  By the time it was churned, the black currant, raspberry, and orange flavors were almost nonexistent – mere aftertastes.  In the future, I’d like to add more orange zest and steep it longer as well as add some raspberry extract to really bring out the flavor.  I’d also like to try this recipe as a sorbet or sherbet, though I have no idea if it’s even possible to make a decent alcoholic sorbet/sherbet.  And yet, as summer nears I have the feeling that I’m going to find out.

Until then, here is the Pink Panther Ice Cream recipe I used.

Ingredients

• 6 oz fresh raspberries
• 1 tbsp orange juice concentrate
• 1 ¾ cups heavy cream
• 1 ¼ cups whole milk
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tsp orange zest
• 2 ½ tbsp crème de cassis

* Note: you might try 1 ¼ cups heavy cream and 1 ¾ cups whole milk.  That will bring it down to the more acceptable 14.3%.

Directions

1. Place the raspberries in a blender and puree until smooth.
2. Strain the puree through a fine-mesh sieve to remove the seeds.
3. In a medium bowl, combine the raspberry puree with the orange juice concentrate.  Cover and set aside.
4. Combine the cream, milk, sugar, salt, and orange zest in a medium saucepan.  Place over medium heat and bring the milk mixture to a low boil.  Cook until the sugar dissolves – 3 minutes.
5. Remove from the heat and pour through a sieve into the raspberry-orange juice mixture.  Cool to room temperature.  Cover and refrigerate until chilled – at least 4 hours.
6. Once chilled, pour the ice cream base into an ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer’s instructions.  When it’s almost churned, add the cassis (Doing so at the end means that your ice cream will actually freeze.).
7. Once churned, transfer to a freezer-safe container and freeze until firm – at least 4 hours.

As I said above, the end result left a lot to be desired, and the churning process really diminished the fruit flavors.  The resulting flavor smelled heavily of oranges and started out tart but was quickly overwhelmed by dairy – kind of like a weak, frozen Orange Julius.  The texture was good though a bit melty (alcohol, you know) and set nicely into a medium firmness.  And, despite my misgivings about this recipe, I wouldn’t necessarily tell people not to try it.  It’s a really pretty lavender-pink, smells delightful, and could be excellent on a summer’s day in a sugar cone.  Just maybe tweak the whipping cream-milk ratio, okay?  You’ll be glad you did.

Overview

• Base prep time: 20 – 30 minutes
• Base chill time: at least 4 hours
• Ice cream set time: at least 4 hours
• Taste: initially tart with strong notes of orange and subtle ones of raspberry and black currant – flavor is quickly overpowered by heavy cream and butterfat
• Difficulty level: medium
• Expense level: low to medium
• Makes: 4 cups (1 quart)