Saffron

In addition to being Mal's fake wife, it's also the world's most expensive spice. I just picked up some lemons and a bottle of poppy seeds from the store, so I could make scones, and noticed a 0.06 oz bottle of saffron on the shelf. Yes, 0.06 oz. The price per ounce? $308!

I didn't buy any. :)

I heard one of the cooks on the Food Network say that the stamens of 75,000 crocuses need to be harvested for a single pound of saffron. Yikes!

Coconut-pineapple ice cream

Previously, I provided instructions for making fruit ice cream. Yesterday I crafted a batch of coconut-pineapple ice cream, in another variation on Alton Brown's recipe for vanilla ice cream. Here's the process...

1/2 cup pineapple, drained and cut into small pieces
1 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut
1 1/2 cups of whole milk
2 1/2 cups of bakers cream (or heavy whipping cream)
9 ounces (by weight) of granulated sugar
1 teaspoon of vanilla
4 tablespoons of vodka or rum

Put the coconut in a medium glass bowl, and pour the milk over it. Put this in the microwave, and zap it 'til the milk boils. Let it sit half an hour or so, then put it in the fridge overnight.

A couple hours before starting the ice cream, add three tablespoons of vodka or rum to the pineapple and put it in the fridge.

Half an hour before starting the ice cream, put a spatula, large glass bowl, and 6-8 cup plastic container in the freezer.

Empty the milk and coconut mixture into your food processor, and pulse a few times until the coconut has been reduced to small pieces. Dump this back into the glass bowl, and add the sugar. Whisk, then add the cream, the vanilla, and one more tablespoon of vodka or rum. Also drain off and add the liquid from the pineapple currently chilling in the fridge (then put the drained pineapple in the freezer to chill further). Mix again, and add the cream mixture to your churner.

25-30 minutes later, empty the ice cream into the large glass bowl from the freezer, add the pineapple, and fold with the spatula. Empty this into the plastic container, freeze for a few hours to ripen, and voila, you have coconut-pineapple ice cream.

It will taste a bit gritty, due to the coconut pieces from the food processor. Personally, I think this adds a nice texture to the ice cream.

The alcohol will help keep the pineapple from freezing solid, as in the aforementioned fruit ice cream recipe. (Frozen fruit chunks are not, as Alton Brown would say, "Good eats.") The alcohol will also help keep the ice cream from freezing too solidly.

--edit--

Why am I using unsweetened coconut? Because of the 9 oz of sugar included in the recipe. There's no way of knowing how much sugar is in a bag of sweetened coconut, hence there's no way to compensate to maintain the 9 oz quantity. By buying unsweetened (or shaving it from a fresh coconut), you maintain the proper amount of sugar. Too much, and your ice cream could come out too sweet.

Similarly, always use unsalted butter when baking. Again, you don't know how much salt is in salted butter, which could potentially throw off a recipe.

All hail Alton Brown!

If you haven't seen Good Eats on the Food Network, start watching! It's a fantastic cooking program, in which the Great and Powerful Alton Brown not only teaches the viewer to make some, well, good eats, but also discusses the science of cooking.

In a recent episode, he demonstrated the making of soft pretzels. I'd been wanting to give them a try, but making pretzels from recipe, versus watching them being made -- well, watching them being made makes a world of difference! A couple of comments on AB's pretzel making...

After bringing the water and soda mixture to a boil, lower the temperature to medium! If you put the pretzels in the water while it's boiling, they're going to come apart!

Also, use a large grain salt! Kosher salt isn't quite large enough. Not being able to see the salt on a pretzel is just wrong. :)

Now to discuss ice cream.

I started making ice cream last year, again compliments of Alton Brown. After making several gallons, I think I've finally figured out how to make fruit ice cream properly (vanilla, chocolate, lemon chiffon, and mint chip are easy, as they just use extract for their flavoring).

One of my issues with ice cream, in general, is that it often freezes so hard it's impossible to scoop without dipping the scoop in hot water between each, uh, scoop. Further, in many fruit ice creams, the fruit chunks freeze solid. The solution? Use three tablespoons of wodka, instead of lemon juice, when macerating the fruit chunks! (If you're not making fruit ice cream, just add the vodka to the mix before putting it in the tumbler.)

The process...

Liquify 2-3 cups of fresh fruit in a food processor, and reduce over medium heat 'til you have about a cup left. Refrigerate. Cut up another cup of fresh fruit into small chunks, adding half a cup of sugar and three tablespoons of vodka. Let this sit a couple hours in the fridge. Put a large, glass bowl into the freezer, along with a spatula and the container into which you plan on storing the ice cream (should have a six- to eight-cup capacity). Put another large, glass bowl into the fridge.

After a couple hours, add 2.5 cups of baker's cream, 1.5 cups of whole milk, 9 oz of sugar (less half a cup for the amount in the macerating fruit), 1 tsp of vanilla, the reduced fruit, and the liquid from the macerating fruit, into the chilled bowl (not the frozen bowl), and mix. Optionally, add a few drops of food coloring to more closely represent the ice cream flavor you're making. Put the macerated fruit in the freezer. Add the ice cream mixture to the tumbler, and run for 25 to 30 minutes. When finished...

Empty the ice cream into the frozen bowl, and add the macerated fruit from the freezer. Fold using the frozen spatula, and empty into the frozen storage container. Cover, and let it sit in the freezer six hours or so before serving.

The vodka will do two things: first, it'll stop the fruit from freezing solid. Second, it'll keep the ice cream soft. The reduced fruit will add a more fruity flavor to the ice cream. Previous fruit ice cream experiments have suggested only adding the liquid from the macerating fruit, but this doesn't add a strong enough flavor to the ice cream.

The result? A fruitier, softer ice cream, with no rock-solid chunks of fruit.