Recipe 32: Root Beer Float Ice Cream

Root beer floats are one of my favorite cold treats, so when I saw Coolhaus’ recipe for Root Beer Float Ice Cream, I knew I had to try it.  The recipe itself was fairly easy, just requiring a custard base and a bit of reduced root beer.  I had high hopes for this recipe and dreams of making a root beer float with it, creating the Ultimate Root Beer Float.

Unfortunately, this recipe didn’t quite turn out the way I’d hoped.  The combination of custard base and reduced root beer was just way too sweet, making it difficult to consume too much.  The custard also seemed a bit high on butterfat, creating that weird, greasy mouth-feel, and the reduced root beer tasted more like molasses and caramel than root beer.  Making a root beer float helped ameliorate these problems and brought out the root beer flavor of the ice cream, but it still wasn’t one of my favorite recipes.  It needs some tweaking.

Ingredients

• 2 cups whole milk
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 ¼ cups granulated sugar
• 8 large egg yolks
• 2 liter bottle root beer (I used A&W, though I’m not sure that was the best choice) 

Directions

1. First make the plain custard base.  Start by adding the milk, cream, and half of the sugar into a medium saucepan.  Set over high heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until mixture comes to a boil – about 5 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk yolks and remaining sugar until smooth, heavy, and pale yellow – about 30 seconds.
3. When the cream mixture comes to a boil, whisk and remove from heat.  Slowly add the cream mixture to the egg mixture ½ cup at a time, whisking constantly until blended.
4. Return pan to stovetop over low heat.  Whisking constantly, pour yolk-cream mixture back into pan.
5. With a wooden spoon or cake spatula, continue stirring until mixture thickens.  Don’t let boil or curdle.  It will be done when it can coat the back of a spoon.
6. Remove base from heat and allow to cool to room temperature.  Then pour into a container, cover, and refrigerate overnight.
7. Now make the root beer syrup (this can be substituted by using root beer flavoring – add about 1 teaspoon at a time to taste).  Set ½ cup root beer aside.  Pour the remaining root beer into a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat.  Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the water evaporates and root beer has reduced to about ½ cup – about 1 hour.  Don’t overheat or it will turn to candy.  Cool to room temperature.
8. Once the root beer syrup is cool, add the reserved ½ cup root beer to the base and stir well.
9. Add the root beer mixture to the base, then add to chilled ice cream canister and process according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
10. Once churned, transfer to an airtight container.  Seal and freeze for at least 2 hours. 

The resulting ice cream will be soft and sweet with noticeable butterfat.  It has a complex flavor, tasting like cream, root beer, molasses, and caramel.  It pairs well with root beer and vanilla ice cream and makes a good milkshake.  However, the butterfat and sugar content make it difficult to consume a lot of it at once.

Overall, I would say that this recipe requires a bit of tweaking.  The plain custard base probably isn’t the best base to use, and you should probably reduce the sugar in the base by half.  I might also suggest either not reducing the root beer or reducing it for half the time; that would probably maintain the root beer flavor better.  Another good suggestion would be to reduce the heavy cream to 1 cup and bump up the milk to 3 cups; that would modify the butterfat and make it more palatable.

While there are some good things to say about this recipe (it really does taste like a root beer float and there is a lot of it), generally I think it still needs quite a bit of tweaking.  I can eat root beer floats for days while this gets difficult to eat after barely a scoop.  Still, I think it has promise and look forward to tweaking it when I have a bit more time and money.  Until then, enjoy!

Overview

• Base prep time: 1 ½ -- 2 hours
• Base chill time: overnight
• Ice cream set time: at least 2 hours
• Taste: very sweet and creamy with a medium-high butterfat content; a complex flavor of root beer, molasses, and caramel
• Difficulty: low to medium
• Expense level: low
• Makes: approximately 8 cups