Now that summer is definitely, officially over, it’s time for me to share with you an ice cream recipe that I’ve been sitting on since approximately May.
In the lead-up to summer, I decided that my summer culinary goal would be perfecting the art of ice cream making. So naturally, I invested in two cookbooks exclusively focused on ice cream (Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home and Salt & Straw Ice Cream Cookbook) and made ice cream exactly one time. But the one ice cream I made was a real winner and I feel like I nailed it, so maybe I actually did achieve my goal?
You may thinking to yourself that olive oil ice cream with pepitas seems like an odd choice when you could pick from literally any flavor in the world. But I had my reasons. When Hudson Yards opened earlier this year, my friends and I made a beeline to Mercado Little Spain, essentially an Eataly-like Spanish wonderland from Jose Andres in the basement of the building. Regardless of your feelings about Hudson Yards, and many of us have them, you should really get over there and spend a couple hours visiting every single station (ham! empanadas! croquettes! paella! patatas bravas! ice cream!) while carrying with you a bottle of fantastic wine, which you can purchase at the wine bar, and a plastic cup. Truly a spectacular way to eat.
Anyway, one of the things I ate there was olive oil ice cream, which on the face of it sounds not very delicious, but is in fact incredibly tasty. My advice would be to use the good stuff here (I used up a bottle we’d bought at a winery in Southern Italy last year), not the Bertolli. A good olive oil not only gives the ice cream an interesting fruity flavor, but it also creates a really creamy texture. And the pepitas obviously add a nice, salty crunch.
So please accept my apologies for getting this to you in October, but let’s be honest, ice cream is a great year-round treat. Here’s to our winter bodies!
Ingredients
- 2 2/3 cups whole milk
- 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons cornstarch
- 2 oz. (4 tablespoons) cream cheese, softened
- 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 1 1/3 cups heavy cream
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup light corn syrup
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1 1/3 cups salted roasted pepitas
Instructions
- Mix about 2 tablespoons of the milk with the cornstarch in a small bowl to make a smooth slurry.
- Whisk the cream cheese and salt in a medium bowl until smooth.
- Fill a large bowl with ice and water.
- Combine the remaining milk, the cream, sugar and corn syrup in a 4-quart saucepan, bring to a rolling boil over medium-high heat and boil for 4 minutes. Remove from the heat and gradually whisk in the cornstarch slurry.
- Bring the mixture back to a boil over medium-high heat and cook, stirring with a heatproof spatula, until slightly thickened, about 1 minute. Remove from the heat.
- Gradually whisk the hot milk mixture into the cream cheese until smooth. Add the olive oil and whisk until well blended.
- Pour the mixture into a 1-gallon Ziploc freezer bag and submerge the sealed bag in the ice bath. Let stand, adding more ice as necessary, until cold, about 30 minutes.
- Pour the ice cream base into the frozen canister of an ice cream maker and spin until thick and creamy.
- Pack the ice cream into a storage container, folding in the pepitas as you go. Press a sheet of parchment paper directly against the surface, and seal with an airtight lid. Freeze in the coldest part of your freezer until firm, at least 4 hours.
