Thursday, February 9, 2017
Lucky Charms Marshmallow Ice Cream
Lucky Charms Marshmallow Ice Cream
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There's an ice cream shop in my neighborhood that's famous for their crazy ice cream flavors. You'll frequently find flavors like Pear and Blue Cheese or Tomato Water and Olive Oil on the menu. On Thanksgiving, Salt & Straw rolls out a salted caramel ice cream that's flavored with turkey juice and caramelized onions. One summer, there was a flavor that combined berries, barbecue sauce, and baked beans.
As a dessert enthusiast, I dive right in. I'll try a scoop of everything, including the ice creams with the pig's blood (Blood Pudding flavor, usually shows up around Halloween, yup), the meat juices, and even sea urchin. Do I enjoy it all?
Er... no, not really.
I know that makes me a bad Portlander, and I'm sure as I write this, the locals are gearing up to throw me some sticks and stones like they did in the comments section of this article. But maybe I'm just a simpleton at heart because the flavors I like best are their "classic" ones: chocolate gooey brownie, coconut with caramel bars, and Stumptown coffee with bourbon.
Every so often, however, I'll try one of their seasonal flavors and be blown right out of the water. Last month, it was a flavor called "Pots of Gold & Rainbows", a cereal milk based ice cream that was studded with all the marshmallows from pounds and pounds of Lucky Charms cereal but without any of their whole grain companions (because let's be honest, the only people who eat Lucky Charms cereal do it for the marshmallows, AMIRITE). It was perfect. There's no other word for it — the ice cream hit the perfect mix of creativity and deliciousness, balancing somewhere between a timeless classic and a more disruptive future demanding change amongst tried and true flavors. I found myself craving the ice cream again and again, lining up in Salt & Straw's obscenely long lines twice a week to buy myself a rather pricey scoop of the stuff.
But since I've never been the most patient person, I figured it was time to learn how to make it at home:
To reverse engineer the ice cream at home, I started by flipping through the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. Cereal milk dessert isn't a Salt & Straw invention; instead, it was popularized a few years ago by famed pastry chef Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar fame. Her New York bakeries actually sell cereal milk by the bottle, and she has pretty solid recipe for cereal milk that I've used in previous recipes (like these cupcakes!). But honestly, it's something that you could easily make without one, AND, if you eat cereal for breakfast every day, you probably already even do. Because here's the secret: cereal milk is nothing but cereal-infused milk. Like you know how when you eat a bowl of cereal, the leftover milk in the bowl once you've eaten all the cereal will have all these tiny cereal crumbs and will taste a little bit like the cereal you just ate? THAT'S CEREAL MILK. That's it. That's all! Seriously.
And so after sorting out the marshmallows (more on that later, grumble), I used the leftover whole grain cereal to make the cereal milk, which I then used in my favorite vanilla ice cream recipe (from Humphry Slocombe, a San Francisco-based ice cream parlor also known for its crazy flavors), churned it all into my ice cream maker, and hand-stirred in the remaining Lucky Charms marshmallows. Oh! And let's not forget — because I am a hedonist, I also bought some waffle cones, dipped them in some melted chocolate and marshmallows and BOOM! Chocolate and Lucky Charms marshmallow-lined waffle cones. Thank you, and good night.
Some baker's notes:
- To make this ice cream, I used the cereal and marshmallows from one family size (20.5 ounces) box of Lucky Charms cereal. I hand sorted out the marshmallows, which gave me around 1 1/2 to 2 cups worth of marshmallows (sorry, I'm not exactly sure since I ate a lot of them while I was doing the sorting, lol) that I needed for this recipe. HOWEVER, thanks to comments from my trusty Instagram followers, I found out that you can actually just BUY straight-up marshmallows from Amazon! So do yourself a favor and make your life easier and buy that instead.
- Toasting the Lucky Charms in the oven before steeping them deepens the flavor of the milk. I didn't add any additional sugar to my steeped milk since I was going to be adding plenty in the ice cream custard base, but if you want your ice cream a little bit sweeter, add up to 2 tablespoons tightly packed light brown sugar. The recipe for Lucky Charms cereal milk below makes more than is needed for the ice cream custard, so you can drink the rest (and it definitely tastes better with a dash or two of sugar). It'll keep in a clean pitcher, refrigerated, for up to 1 week.
- The ice cream recipe I use is a custard base containing cream, milk, and eggs. Before starting the cooking process, make sure you have the bowl and ice bath ready to cool down your base as soon as its finished cooking. This is essential, since the hot custard will continue to cook for a while, and if you overcook the custard you'll end up with sugary scrambled eggs for ice cream. Which... no thank you.
- To make the chocolate and marshmallow dipped waffle cones, I used about 1 ounce of melted dark chocolate and 1 tablespoon of Lucky Charms marshmallows per cone.
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