I was gifted the Salt & Straw ice cream recipe book. It offers three bases: cow milk, sorbet/corn syrup, and coconut milk. Each requests xanthan gum, and coconut milk wants boxed coconut cream.
Most recipes are based on the cow milk, and the book doesn't discuss whether one could swap the bases. Figured I might as well try.
For 4th of July weekend, I tried two recipes using the coconut milk base since I have family who is alelrgic to dairy: salted caramel bars & coconut cream, and garam masala cauliflower (supposed to be milk based).
The coconut milk base is fairly mild, and tasty on its own. One is supposed to strain out the toasted coconut before using the base, which I did, however, next time I might try leaving it in to see if the Creami would pulverize.
The salted caramel bar recipe includes coconut cream caramel, a chocolate ganache, and caramel bars. I skipped the bars because it required way more effort (I should've read the recipe and started on all this much earlier), and instead subbed in roasted cashews. The ice cream base spun up almost liquid soft, I have no idea what happened, but it made hand-mixing in the ganache, caramel, and cashews easy. This was ridiculously tasty. The roasted cashews were perfect and kept it from becoming cloying. Highly recommended.
For garam masala cauliflower, there were issues: first, their garam masala spice recipe looks more chai tea and heavy on the cinnamon (I do not like cinnamon). I didn't have the requisite spices, so used the london-made garam masala I picked up in St. Martin last year with some Badia jamaican curry spice mix I bought in Aruba this year, then extra ceylon cinnamon from Ralph's. Roasting per their instructions was ineffective, I had to up the temp to 400F and increase time an extra 10 minutes time to a little cauliflower browning and toasting of the spices. The blended cauliflower with the coconut base tasted very good, but it was so mild that I added double the cauliflower mix into the coconut base before freezing. Probably mistake #2. It froze up solid and spun well to a silky texture. The taste.. at first image like what a very ripe fart smells like, quite potent. Then the cauliflower came through along with the garam masala and curry spices. Although this was a strange experience and none of us seemed to like it, we kept digging in for more tastes, I think to try to figure it out because it was rather strange. It begun to taste like Indian restaurant steam tray lunch bar food.. so yeah, not bad? Despite the 1/2 pound turkey burgers we had an hour earlier, this ice cream kind of made us hungry. Anyway, I heated it up this afternoon and poured over some left over rice and garbanzo beans for lunch with a few pickled jalapenos, it was good sauce.
I am intrigued with the garam masala recipe and will try it again using their spice combo and quantity, and TBD whether I'll use the milk or coconut base. The coconut base did go well with it, once you get over the flatulent-like aromatics of cauliflower. I'm also going to make more of the coconut base and try without straining to see how that works.
Sorry, no photos of the salted caramel looked a complete mess. As you can see, the cauliflower one was an off-white beige color that looked like a poor paint job in a single-story bourgeoisie home in east Costa Mesa before going on the market at an over-priced sales number because of demand for the area.
