52 To Do

Last night combined two of my new favorite things, home roasting coffee and hand cranking ice cream. Ok, maybe the hand cranking isn’t my favorite thing, but with friends it’s not so bad and the result is pretty fantastic. We started out by stovetop roasting a batch of Rwandan coffee to a semi-dark roast. You can check out more info here about home coffee roasting from when I did that week in early January. We then added the grounds to the basic ice cream base from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream at Home, following her recipe for dark roast coffee ice cream.

Talk about a delicious smell. Fresh roasted coffee, cream, sugar…pretty divine. Unfortunately there was still a lot of work to be done to turn it into ice cream. We strained the grounds out, brought it back to a boil adding the thickener (milk and cornstarch) and then added it to the cream cheese and salt mixture. We got to enjoy a little wine break as the mixture cooled in an ice bath.

Then it was back to taking turns cranking again. This batch was 2 quarts, so it took us about a half hour to get it cold.

We were lacking in some of the manpower we had the other night but we ladies still did the job. My friend Jess was not to be daunted by how difficult it got towards the end. I tried to be patient but my desire to try the ice cream finally took over from powering through. Once we were finished the result was once again pretty darn awesome.

I think it will be a lot of fun to continue to try different beans and roasts making homemade ice cream. You can really taste the oil and flavor from the beans, so it will be interesting to see how different varieties work.

Tonight I’m going to be trying out a locally inspired ice cream recipe. I’m sticking with Jeni’s book because so far it’s led to some pretty fantastic ice cream. No need to mess with a good thing.