Okay, so it doesn’t look so good HERE, but just wait.
At Range on Valencia Street, I had a prune and walnut ice cream with a chocolate souffle. That made me talk about prune ice cream with Kayo, and that made me make prune ice cream today! (Well, I made the custard yesterday.)
I looked up some recipes, but the first one had ten egg yolks which sounded… extreme. So after reading about various versions, I made this one up.
Prune & Cognac Ice Cream
4-5 egg yolks
1 1/2 cups moist pitted prunes
1 pt heavy cream
1 c half and half
1 c milk
1 c sugar (I used 3/4 white and 1/4 brown)
1 vanilla bean
a bit of lemon zest
dash of salt
some cognac
optional: some more cognac
Pour a shot of cognac over 1 cup of the prunes and the vanilla bean (sliced partway through so the seeds can get out) then pour boiling water over them and put them aside while you make the custard.
Heat the milk and half & half in a saucepan until right before it boils. Turn off.
Whisk the sugar and the egg yolks together. While whisking constantly, slowly add the milk mixture to the egg mixture. Return to the pot and cook over a low temperature. Ice cream recipes always say to do this until it forms a coating on a metal spoon, but I have yet to actually figure that one out. Don’t let it boil! I cook it to about 170 degrees. Remove from heat.
Remove the vanilla bean from the prunes. Drain the water/cognac off them. With a handblender, moosh them all up into a prune puree. Add the heavy cream to this and moosh it up some more. It will become a hideous tasty paste.
Fold the hideous tasty paste into the custard. Stir in a pinch of salt. (Ah HA! A trick! Previously I called for a dash.) Zest just a little bit of a lemon and stir that in.
Allow to chill fully.
Stir in an ounce of cognac, and freeze it in your ice cream maker.
While it is freezing, chop up the remaining prunes and spread them out on a sheet in the freezer to freeze a little.
The ice cream will come out pretty soft-servish due to the booze, so when it’s done, scoop it into whatever you are scooping it into and check it every 45 minutes or so for a couple of hours, fluffing it and scraping it off the edges. That’s right. I said fluff it. During one of these fluffings, fold in the folded prune bits. This would be a good time to add nuts if you wanted to add nuts. I didn’t add nuts.
Okay, so this ice cream is really delicious but I did have an epiphany when tasting it: It’s like really super swank rum raisin.
