melissa makes bread

Prune & Armagnac Ice Cream

Jane Grigson, the celebrated English cookery writer, writes "The best prunes are reckoned to come from Agen, or the district known as the Agenais. As this is Armagnac country, too, they are often put together in a most felicitous way."

I first came across prune and armagnac ice cream in Lindsay Shere's Chez Panisse Desserts. Her ice cream recipes have worked so well for me at home; they tend not to ice up after they've been processed. The dairy fat content is slightly higher than the recipes I've used in restaurants.

Paula Wolfert also has some lovely recipes with prunes and armagnac in her book "The Cooking of South-West France".

For me, the texture of this ice cream is so luxurious. The soaked prunes are added to the ice cream after it is churned. The prunes are naturally creamy. The armagnac adds flavor, but also lowers the freezing point contributing to the creamy texture.

Cacao Nib Ice Cream

Cacao nibs are interesting to me.  They are roasted, shelled cacao beans and can be thought of as the precursor to chocolate bars and cocoa powder.  They are not sweet, but exceptionally flavorful and aromatic. 

When chocolate is manufactured, the cacao beans are removed from their pods, fermented, dried, and then cleaned.  The beans are then roasted and cracked open to remove the hard outer shell.  The shell is discarded and what remains are the nibs.  The nibs are ground into a paste, and the paste is processed diferently according to the desired product, be it cocoa powder, unsweetened chocolate bars for baking, bittersweet or semisweet chocolate. 

Sharffenberger chocolate makers have packaged cacao nibs for retail sale, and they are fairly easy to find.  Recently I happened to find them both at Williams-Sonoma and Whole Foods. 

I came across an interesting recipe from Sharffenberger for cacao nib ice cream that I wanted to try.  And the photo of the ice cream, above, is my version of their recipe.  To make the ice cream, I infused the cacao nibs and a vanilla bean in the milk and cream for a good half hour.  Then I proceded to make the ice cream base.  After churning the base in an ice cream maker I swirled in caramelized cacao nibs (think 'cacao nib britttle'), and then placed the ice cream in the freezer to finish setting up.  The result was wonderful.  The flavor reminded me of a really, really good chocolate brownie.  And the crunchy bits of nibs provided an interesting texture, in addition to adding to the intensity of the flavor.