How to Make a Ginger Ice Cream

Eric: Okay so, today there is no one here to help me. Lynn is at the barn and Bill has not walked in the door yet so I can't handle the camera. But we have got a lot to do today. Friends of ours, actually Bill and Elsa who live at the camp with no electricity here, running water doesn't matter; have invited us to the dinner and they asked us to bring a dessert. So, it's the middle of winter. And I thought that the best thing to make for the middle of winter is ice-cream. And we are going to make basically a ginger ice-cream which is really-really good, and it's really-really simple. You can do this; it's the easiest thing in the world. It's basically cream and milk and some ginger and eggs. I went to Bill Hilliard's farm and got eggs and I left them in the truck so, we have to get those. I have got to get to the trucks and get the eggs; you want to come with me? We are going to make what's called a custard based ice-cream. Now, we are just going to take some ginger and two cups of milk and we are going to heat them up at a saucepan to about a 170 degrees. You take some ginger, this is actually ginger that I had in a freezer. You can just, you got to wrap it like double wrap it in plastic wrap and it will keep for a while. This is pretty good. This is not bad for a couple of months. So, you just take a knife and you cut the skin off. This is called a micro-plane. It's just a neat, neat grater. You know you can use it for cheese and stuff. But I also used it to grate ginger. You could also use what is called a ginger grater which is like this porcelain looking thing with a little nubbins on it. But this works just fine and I am just going to take this. And you can see how that builds up in the back and just take it and dump it right in. Okay, so you just basically want to stir this from, you know u basically have to keep your eye on it. Make sure you don't boil it and ruin the whole thing. Or what you are doing is that you are steeping that ginger in a warm milk. Grocery stores sell these; it is called an instant read thermometer. It is like all of $4.00 and they are great. So you are basically just going to occasionally check your temperature. Oh that is too close, I need my glasses. About a 160 degrees or about a 170 degrees. Okay, so while we are heating up the ginger and the milk. We are going to take four eggs. These are the eggs from my friend Bill's house. We are going to do an episode on making maple syrup with him. We are going to take this separate out the yolks and cream these with sugar, or, whisk them with sugar, I think you cream butter. We are going to whisk together the sugar, and the yolks, and we are going to add this into the hot milk mixture. You know, lot of people they bang their eggs here, that doesn't work for me. I genuinely tap it here, and it cracks nicely. And, then when I am going to separate my yolks I do it in the sink, not over the bowl that I want the yolks to go in. Alright so we crack open the shell and we let the white of the egg come out like that. And then we just toss this back and forth. You can also separate these in your hand if you just want to put them in your hands like this. You can also do it like that. That one separates really nicely. Okay, I am going step out of my usual repository tools which involves a fork basically and use a whisk. For this kind of thing I want to kind of thing, I want to kind of cream together the yolk and the sugar and this works really well. John and Sherry bought this for me and I just wanted to show them that I do actually use it. Do you want to do this for about two or three minutes. This is the color that you want. You want to look like this. Okay, now we are going to take the ginger and milk thing, I don't know what you call it, the mix, which I have almost burned by the way. And then we are going to slowly stir that a little bit of the time, my bowl is spinning, into the egg yolk mixture. You don't want to put it all in at once because you make scrambled eggs. Okay, so now we have mixed the milk, the hot milk with the ginger stuff into the eggs and the sugar. And now we have to reheat it again. And I am going to use a double boiler. I don't have a fancy one, I am just, what I do is I take a saucepan, and I will put some water in it and then I stick another bowl on top, and that's my double-boiler. And that's all you need to do. But we just need to reheat it, because we are making a custard. I like the double-boiler because you can't burn it easily that way. This is right at a 180 degrees right now. And you can tell this is definitely thickened up. When you go like that, it kind of holds and it definitely tastes custardy and gingery; so, this is good. Alright, so we are going to take this or we are going to strain it into a bowl now. Pour that through, so you want to press this through. Sorry about that. It's good, I think it needs more ginger though. So I am just going to grate some straight into it. And see what happens. Alright, it's definitely better. Okay, so we are done with the cooking part. Now, all we have to do is take our custardy-ginger milk cream sugar mix and bring it down to a low temperature because we are going to then put it in our ice-cream maker machine. So, some people say put it into refrigerator for 4-8 hours, other people say, put it in a bowl of ice to bring it down the temperature. We have a very-very low-tech solution for this at gardenfork.Tv. It's called the freezer. This thing is what makes the ice-cream, ice-cream. It is this super cool fluid liquid stuff in here. It's freezing my hands right now. But you have got to take this thing and put it in the freezer the night before you want to make ice-cream. That's the one thing you got to remember. Wow! Cold! So, Lynn came home and... Lynn: From the barn. Eric: From the barn, and reminded me that I forgot to put a key ingredient in the ice-cream, which is... Lynn: I said, what is this? Eric: Yeah, what is this cream I left laying around. So I forgot to put the cream in the ice-cream in. So, this is been in a -No, I am just idiot. Alright, so this is been in the freezer cooling down. So we will just add, what's this cream. Yeah heavy cream we can use. Lynn: You know who really likes heavy cream? Eric: Cream goes in. Lynn: Rinsed your freezer? Eric: Well, restarted freezer. I cleaned it up allover. Lynn: Smells a bit. Eric: No, no. Lynn: We got worse things. Eric: Yeah, like my workshop. Lynn: What's that? Let me have the key ingredients. Eric: Oh, Jesus! Lynn: Alright that was not an act! Eric: That's was not act at all! Lynn: That is a true look of disgust! Eric: Part of the ginger ice-cream is your crunch up these little cookies; well these are ginger snap cookies, ginger cookies. And part of the recipe if you crinkle these up, and you put them into the mix. But I am going to wait and put these in when we put it into the mixture. I have been eating these all day. Lynn: Let us look around for some more missing ingredients. Eric: What else have I forgotten in this recipe? Okay, so we put the cream in that, I forgot to put in and now we are outside on the porch where it's 20 degrees out here. But that will figure that it's a perfect place to make ice-cream, because it is cold. Well what we do is we put a cold-gizmo on top of the base here. This goes on so this is going to go in. This might not be the best way to this. So, we are going to let this run for about 30 minutes. What this does is that it introduces air into the mix. Lynn: Dude, what happened? Eric: Well as usual I made several mistakes. So what I did wrong was, I want to make some ice-cream and I already had some ice-cream in here. So, I scooped it out, and then I ran some water in here real quick to clean it up and I through it back in the freezer and I thought it will just freeze up really quick. But you really have to put this thing in the freezer over night, like I had said. This was not nearly cold enough to make it into ice-cream. So tomorrow we are going to make this recipe again. And then you will see... Lynn: How good it can be. Eric: It's really good, it is just that I screwed it up again, so which is not unusual in my life. Alright, so here we go! There were a couple of key things I did wrong with the first batch. First of all, I didn't cool down the freezer container long enough and also when we were shooting the episode the refrigerator was making a lot of noise, so I turned the refrigerator off. So the stuff never cooled down enough and I didn't take the temperature but I was... Lynn: That four eggs came first and it doesn't have cream in it. Eric: This is what ice-cream is supposed to look like, when you remember to turn on the refrigerator. Lynn: And put cream in it. Eric: Yeah, and put cream in it. Lynn: Wow! Eric: That's amazing. So, that is it go to gardenfork.tv and go to the episodes/blog button and I will give you the recipe for this and recipes for other shows. And tell your friends and e-mail us and tell us what you think, alright.