Daisy Garnett's Pine Nut Ice Cream

Name: Daisy Garnett's Pine Nut Ice Cream
Prep time: 125 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 155 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Italian
Ingredients: 125g pine nuts; 150g acacia honey or any runny mild-flavoured honey; 600ml double cream; 300ml full-fat milk; 4 coffee beans; 4 strips orange peel pared away from the fruit using a vegetable peeler; 7 free-range egg yolks

Over a year ago 2,401 views

Prep: 125 mins

Cook: 30 mins

Serves: 4

Italian Dessert

Ingredients

125g pine nuts
150g acacia honey or any runny mild-flavoured honey
600ml double cream
300ml full-fat milk
4 coffee beans
4 strips orange peel pared away from the fruit using a vegetable peeler
7 free-range egg yolks

Accompaniment

Description

Creative ingredients produce a mouthwatering Italian dessert.

Method

1
Roast the pine nuts on a baking tray in a preheated moderate oven (180C/160C fan/350F/gas 4) for 5-10 minutes, giving them a stir halfway through, until they are lightly toasted.
2
You can toast them in a large, dry frying pan if you'd prefer, but make sure the pine nuts are in a single layer and watch them like a hawk.
3
Do not let them burn. If they do, cut your losses and start again.
4
Blend the nuts with the honey in a food processor, so that the mixture forms a smooth paste.
5
Put this paste, together with the cream, milk, coffee beans and orange peel, into a pan and heat it until just below boiling point – that is, until you see bubbles just beginning to appear around the edges of the pan.
6
Remove from the heat.
7
Whisk the egg yolks in a bowl, then pour the hot milk and cream mixture over them, and stir everything together well.
8
Wash out the saucepan you've just used, so that any burnt milk particles lingering in the bottom of the pan are banished.
9
Pour the custard back into the clean pan.
10
Cook this mixture over a slow heat – I use a diffuser mat – stirring constantly for about ten minutes, by which point the liquid will have reached 75C/165F.
11
You will know this by using your sugar thermometer.
12
If it hasn't reached 75C/165F, keep stirring and gently heating until it has.
13
Once it has reached the correct temperature and thickened somewhat, remove it from the heat and cool the mixture by pouring it into a bowl, preferably one sitting in iced water.
14
When cool, put the whole mixture through a sieve, then let it sit in the fridge for half an hour, before churning it in your ice-cream maker.
15
Transfer to a container with a tight-fitting lid and freeze for three hours before serving.
16
If you freeze it for longer, make sure you take it out half an hour or so before serving it, so it becomes soft enough to eat.

Chef's Tips

A note on sugar thermometers: use one. They are a fail-safe way of knowing how long you need to cook the egg-custard base for. That's very important, because if you cook it too long it can curdle, resulting in a grainy ice cream. An inferior ice-cream maker, with too small a motor, can be another reason for this. But start with a sugar thermometer, you can get them fairly cheaply at even the most basic kitchen shops.