Coconut ice cream

Hi folks,

We took a few days off for Easter and went to visit David and Peter in their respective cities. This led to two ice cream experiments, one of them being related here.

At the end of 3 amazing days in Newcastle, after a day of bike-pushing in the rain, an intense Shakespeare play and a direct-live heart attack (not from us, fortunately), Julie expressed the wish to crank some ice cream, to put an nice end to this gustatorily intense stay.

We came up with the idea of coconut, which had been tried, for my part, with chocolate, but never on its own.

After wondering for a few minutes in the supermarket about the difference between coconut milk and coconut cream, we decided to buy the two types, just in case.

The recipe thus went :

– two 160 mL cans of coconut cream.

– one 300 mL can of coconut milk.

– one egg.

-one cup of sugar.

– whole milk

– a big handful of dessicated coconut.

We made it simple : Russell recipe, with coconut instead of cream. We decided to top up with regular milk and not coconut milk, because we thought the mix would be too rich (coconut milk is about 17% fat…).

We added dessicated coconut to the mix, to have a bit of a gritty texture, which I thought was important, although I can understand those who prefer a smooth texture.

NB : roasting dessicated coconut to enhance the flavour is useless, believe it, we’ve tried…

We then went cranking in David and Julie’s back garden, with Julie taking thousands of photos of everything.

Conclusion : I personally think this ice cream was rather good : fresh and pure, not too rich… The only thing is that canned coconut does not really correspond to the taste of real coconut, it has a slight aftertaste of bitter almonds. Next step is of course to break open the fruit ourselves!