Up All Night

We All Scream Three

The latest experiment was inspired by my favorite flavor back at JP Licks: coffee oreo. Oh, I love coffee ice cream, and I vastly prefer cookie bits to chocolate chips in my ice cream (it's a texture thing, since this is frozen food). But it's not a combination I have found in my non-dairy case.

Obviously, the solution is to make it myself. Except I didn't like any of the coconut-milk coffee ice cream recipes that the Internet found for me. So instead I decided to take a risk: based on what I learned from the successful chocolate batch, hopefully I knew just enough to adapt a cow-milk-based recipe. Nothing fancy; just the simplest recipe I could find.


And it worked. I used the coffee ice cream recipe from Ice Creams & Sorbets: Cool Recipes by Lou Seibert Pappas, a marriage gift from several of you that you included with the ice cream maker :) I bought some non-dairy double chocolate oreo equivalents from Trader Joe's, and I went to it.


The biggest challenge was the coffee itself. We're not coffee drinkers, so we have a low tolerance for caffeine. Okay, let's use decaf. Duh.
EXCEPT.
For ice cream, you need one of two things: whole beans (so you can steep and then sift out), or instant (so the crystals dissolve right into the custard). And... we couldn't find either of those in decaf. The only decaf we could find was ground - which is too big and too small at the same time.

We wound up grabbing a full-caffeine instant (even instant is so hard to find these days!). And wow, the flavor was great - coffee coffee coffee!!! - but the caffeine had us WIRED all last night.

The other lesson we took from this is to change how we add in the cookies. I broke them up first, but then they wound up pulverized. Next time I should just throw them in whole and assume it'll take care of itself. Or fold them in before going into the freezer. Whichever I'm up for trying.

The coffee flavor is strong enough that you can't taste the coconut. Which is great - while I am learning to like coconut flavor, I don't want all of my ice cream to have to taste of coconut. I want variety :)

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We shared all three flavors with our guests tonight. I think that now that I have the texture as close as I think I'm getting with the success of the chocolate and coffee (obviously I need to make mocha, another favorite), I can play with milder flavors. See what goes well with coconut. (Besides de lime.)

It requires advanced planning (and coconut milk isn't cheap, especially since I have to buy the cans instead of the dairy case quarts because ice cream requires a high fat content), but I feel so much happier being able to make my own ice cream. It's frustrating when I go out to eat and I can't have milk. This helps :)