Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

These are hot days. You would think, what with the ferocious winters, Montreal would at least boast clement summers. Sadly, this is not the case. Even what has been a singularly cold, rainy and depressing July isn't the norm. The norm is high twenties and extreme humidity. All this to say--what better time to make ice cream?

Mint has taken over our backyard, and I wanted to try something that was not chocolate, vanilla, or fruit sorbet (I love fruit sorbet, but at this time of year I can't bring myself not to eat fruit raw). The obvious is mint chocolate chip. Yum. Refreshing, chocolatey and smooth.

Also, it uses some of the rampaging mint. But here's the catch--none of the recipes I can find use mint, preferring peppermint extract. Peppermint extract? To me, that sounds like making vanilla ice cream without a vanilla bean: a cop-out. Maybe I'm being stuck up, but I wasn't going to buy any of it. So.

Vanilla ice cream scrapes the weird little seedy sticky things from the inside of the pod into the custard (a tell-tale sign of good vanilla is little black specs) then lets the milk stand or simmer or both for something like fifteen minutes with the pod, after which it is discarded. Here, I could use the infusing plan, but bits of crushed mint-leaf didn't sound like such an appealing stir-in. (Also, beware "bits" that are supposed to give the whole a flavor; they don't magically exude taste. They explode in your mouth and overpower everything else. I had a very good brownie once at Au Festin de Babette on St-Denis, warmth and gooiness-wise. But it had bits of crystallized ginger in it, and it was really weird. I ended up just sort of avoiding them.)

Before I give the game plan, I'll go over ice cream technique. Whisk egg yolks with a lot of sugar until thickened and pale yellow. Simmer milk, cream, whatever it is. Whisk hot dairy gradually into eggs, return to saucepan, thicken, stirring constantly, until "the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon." Refrigerate till cold. Freeze. Add stir-ins in last 5min of freezing.

My original plan was to replace the sugar in the recipe with sugar syrup, which would be easy to flavour with mint. It would be like... really really sweet mint tea. Then I would also simmer the milk 5min and let stand 10min with lots of mint sprigs. I used the recipe in the ice cream book for simple syrup: equal parts sugar and water, simmer 2min. But with mint.

First modification: although the syrup was very minty, I chickened out of replacing the sugar with it because of proportion concerns (cup for cup replacement? Yes? No?) and because I didn't think it was thick enough. I ended up replacing 2 tbsp of sugar with it. It did lightly flavour the eggs, but not enough to carry the ice cream.

Second: because of this, I decided to leave the mint sprigs in the mix right up until the custard thickened. I kept adding new leaves en panique. And in the end, I wrapped some mint in cheesecloth and popped it in while the custard refrigerated, removing only before freezing.

For the chocolate chips, I chopped up a whole bunch of chocolate by hand. One or two handfuls; I didn't bother to measure, which may have been a bad idea. And the verdict...

Pretty good! The mint flavour was definitely there. It was very different, and far more sincere, than it would have been with extract.The chocolate tasted great. The ice cream was smooth. But I had a few complaints about the finished product, and these are they:
1. The mint flavour wasn't strong enough. Better, but weaker than if I'd used extract. I'd wanted something that made you go Whoa, mint! Instead of Oh, mint.
2. Too much chocolate. Though it was chopped to the right degree, and added texture to a certain extent, the crunchiness was overpowering and kind of obliterated any other texture.
3. It wasn't frozen enough--but this was solved after freezing it, out of the ice cream maker, in a container in the fridge and eating the next day.
So, for next time:
1.Don't chicken out of the syrup. I'm going adapt a recipe that calls for syrup to get the proportions right, simply adding the mint.
2. Make the milk mint-infusing simpler by making mint teabags with cheesecloth and changing them for fresh ones when the milk is added to the eggs. I doubt infusing while chilling made much difference, so I'll leave that out.
3. Decrease the chocolate by half. My guess is I used something like a cup, so I'll do half next time.
Overall, though, a successful experiment, and pretty delicious. I'll be trying it again. When I do, I'll post the finalized recipe. In the meantime, I'm going to use the mint syrup to make interesting cold drinks. Because, after all, these are hot days.