South Africa is a great country. One of the many reasons for this is the abundance of public holidays bestowed upon its people, my favourite of which is National Braai day. For those of you who do not avidly follow the Triple Motion website and so missed out on the ‘Triple motion reaches the Southern hemisphere’ entry, a braai is a national pastime here that involves making a lekker (nice) fire and slapping a few hunks of meat on it. In the UK we would call it a BBQ, but they seem to occur so infrequently, the term has fallen out of common usage.
Anyways, I digress. So the 24th of October is National Braai day (although you may have seen it advertised as Heritage day too) and I thought there was no better way to celebrate than with a batch of ice-cream. I debated for a good long while about what flavour… maybe Wors (sausage), or perhaps biltong (dried meat). Intriguing though the prospect of meaty ice cream was, I thought best not inflict this on the wider populous just yet, so instead I thought I would go for something to fit the balmy public holiday weather. Hence pear, ginger and lemon was born.
Sadly when I woke up on the 24th, the weather was more typical of a UK public holiday than a South African one and proceeded to be cold and drizzly for much of the day. But when has that ever deterred a TM ice-cream maker!
So off I went with my trusty churn to the Marrison house. This fantastic family are the driving force behind the newly formed Jonkershoek Volunteer Wildfire Service and are instrumental in assembling a trained group of people to help protect land and property against the devastating fires which rage through the area every summer. What better to feed a family of fire fighters than with some ice (cream)!
The recipe was pretty simple and was largely inspired by the old favourite ‘apple and cinnamon‘ but with a few seasonal variations. To make a half gallon mix I used the following adaptation of the Russell recipe:
- 1 kg pear (I used Williams, but any ripe flavoursome variety would work)
- 6 cm fresh ginger root
- Zest and juice of ½ lemon
- ½ cup sugar
- 2 cups cream
- 1 cup milk
- 2 eggs
First the pears were pealed and chopped and gently stewed in their own juices until soft. Then the lemon and ginger were grated into the pan and left to infuse while the mixture cooled. Once cold, I blended the whole lot to a fine pure using a hand blender. At this point I probably should have passed the pure through a sieve (or a pair of tights) so make it super smooth but both the afore mentioned tools were missing from my kitchen so it was left as was.
Approximately 1 ½ cups of this mixture were added to the cream, milk and egg mix and the churning begin.
As usual, it was a true family affair.
The final result was pleasantly refreshing and although the pear flavour was quite subtle, the combination of all three flavourings worked quite well, with each one hitting the palette at a different time.
Post script: Although a relatively new addition to the Jonkershoek valley, Triple Motion ice-cream is building up quite a following. This ‘little fella’ was so keen to get some action that he stowed away in my car when I was heading out to crank.
I love Africa!!
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