lavendar vanilla frozen custard

Complete dive school. That's what's at the top of my New Year's resolutions list. It's a carry-over from last year's list and has nothing to do with this post except I figured you might be curious about my number one when you read my number two.

Number two is Make a perfect vanilla ice cream, a new addition on which I'm already hard at work. Since my roommate Ryan and I bought an ice cream maker last year I've been toying around with ingredient combination and have yet to find something I'm thrilled with. Granted most everything has been delicious, excepting a couple major flops, I'm trying to find something else. Something really transcendent.

Here's what I know: I won't use cornstarch or corn syrup, no matter how much David Lebovitz says they'd help. I want to use only natural ingredients and not because I care so much about the health issue -- I mean, it's ice cream -- but because you can buy perfectly good corn syrupy ice cream at the grocery store.

I'm not a ludite. I have no resistance to technology or "progress," even if I still don't know how to make sound come out of my TV at times. (It's really not easy. There are a lot settings and a lot of wires that sometimes get unplugged.) Still, the point of making ice cream at home, to me, is to create something basic and knowable. To wonder at the fact that combining milk sugar and eggs in just this certain way changes them fundamentally. It's like magic, only better because the trick is still amazing even when you know how it's done.

Corn syrup, on the other hand, is a laboratory food, made by boiling corn solids down for a long time under specific, controlled conditions. It may help my ice cream but it'd take the magic out of it for me too.

Final note: As you can see, this is a recipe for lavender vanilla frozen custard, not vanilla ice cream. I'm playing with other flavors to help me figure out what works and what doesn't, and maintain the interest of my tasting audience, of course. Also, in the way that people say you can judge the quality of a restaurant on whether or not they can make a good chicken, I figure if I can master vanilla, I've got a leg up on other flavors. 

Recipe adapted from Epicurious. 

INGREDIENTS

1.5 cups heavy cream

1.5 cup half-and-half

2/3 cup sugar

2 tablespoons dried edible lavender

2 eggs

1/8 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

DIRECTIONS

Bring cream, half-and-half, and lavender just to a boil in a heavy saucepan over moderate heat, stirring occasionally. Remove pan from heat and steep covered for 30 minutes. 

Pour mixture through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl and discard the lavender. Return mixture to cleaned saucepan and heat over moderate heat until hot. 

Whisk together eggs, salt and vanilla in a large bowl, then whisk in 1 cup hot cream mixture in a slow stream. 

Pour into remaining hot cream mixture in saucepan and cook over moderately low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon until thick enough to coat back of spoon, about 5 minutes. DO NOT LET IT BOIL!

Pour custard through sieve into a clean bowl to catch any eggy bits. 

Allow the custard to cool completely, stirring occasionally. Chill, covered, until cold, at least 3 hours. 

Freeze custard in ice cream maker. Transfer ice cream to an airtight container and put in freezer to harden.

NOTES: Fresh from the ice cream maker, the lavender was potent and flowery. Almost too much so. After hardening in the freezer overnight, the flavor mellowed to something like a sweet cream with lavender on the back end, a faintly medicinal warming after each swallow.