Ice Cream: Garden Mint Chocolate Oreo

Ice cream is one of my greatest loves. I am definitely not an ice cream snob as I found out this past week in Rome when I experienced gelato - rated the "best gelato in Rome" by some. It was in fact delicious (stay tuned for our attempts to recreate the fantastic pistachio and hazelnut flavors), but give me a tub of Edy's and I'll be perfectly pleased. In any case, I love ice cream but unfortunately we have very few if any options for decent ice cream here in Israel. So you can imagine how excited I was when my sister and brother-in-law got me an ice cream maker for a birthday present! They are way ahead of us in their ice cream inventions, having had their ice cream maker for a few months already, so when I heard about their latest experiment I asked my sister to share her recipe. Enjoy!

I found some recipes online for mint chocolate chip ice cream using real mint that looked really good, most notably this one. David Lebovitz is the ice cream man, so I figured it would be pretty good, but I didn’t want to use eggs. Eggs make the recipe more complicated and expensive. But I did want it to be super-creamy. I decided to make the custard with cornstarch instead of eggs, and made a few other alterations. Here’s the recipe I used:

125 grams mint, with stems

1 1/3 cups sugar

500 ml 10% cream

1 cup 1% milk

Dash of salt

250 ml 32% cream

4 Tablespoons cornstarch

Oreo cookies

1 bar of chocolate

1-2 tsp peppermint extract

I bought a bundle of mint from the grocery store pulled off all the leaves (I weighed it with stalks it was 125 grams) and combined that with 1 1/3 cups of sugar approximately, dash of salt, 500 ml of 10% cooking cream, and 1 cup of 1% milk. I cooked that until it was steaming but not boiling and then let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. There was a significant differences between how minty and green it was after the first hour and how minty and green it was after the second, so I would say leave it in for even longer if you want it to be even more minty and even more green.

When you think it’s minty and green enough, strain the leaves out. You have to really press and squeeze the leaves to get the minty-ness out of them. Discard the leaves and reheat your minty milk on the stove.

In the meantime, combine the 32% cream with the 4 tablespoons of cornstarch and whisk so that there are no lumps. After the mint mixture is hot (steaming, but not boiling) add in your cornstarch mixture.

Bring it to a boil and wait until it thickens while stirring. It should coat the back of the spoon/be the consistency you would expect hot pudding to be. When it’s done put it in the fridge to cool overnight and then process according to your ice cream makers instructions!

That’s the basic recipe for the mint ice cream. Also don’t forget to cover the custard mixture with saran wrap pressed into it while it’s cooling. I did and it formed a skin, but it was no harm done anyway. I think you could probably make it with more milk, less cream, or lower fat creams too -- this was just kind of what I had in the house.

I couldn’t decide whether I wanted mint cookies and cream or mint chocolate chip. So in the end I decided that I should just have both. I melted a bar of chocolate in the microwave and added a few teaspoons of peppermint extract to it.

My original plan was to dip the oreos in the mixture, but once I added the extract it got all grainy (probably something to do with the emulsion blah, blah, but whatever that’s Yoni’s department), so instead I just spread the chocolate over the oreos. I put them on a plate covered in tin foil, covered them in plastic wrap and stuck them in the freezer.

The next morning when the ice cream was churning I took them out and put them in the food processor. I pulsed them a couple of times to break them up some and then dumped it into the ice cream mixture towards the end. So good! The mint has an herb-like natural taste and the peppermint chocolate oreos are amazing. In theory you could also make this ice cream using regular old peppermint extract instead of mint leaves and it would taste more like store bought mint ice cream.

This sounds crazier than it is. It's really not that complicated. And it tastes so good.

--SNH