Chai Tea and Coffee ice cream

I've been a little behind on the ice cream posts. We've been experimenting with different ice-cream flavors over the past few weeks (I'm also trying to fatten Pat up for the Winter <-- capitalized, because... it's coming).

After the initial custard ice cream disaster with the pistachio ice-cream - I decided to man up and try my hand at two more custard-based recipes. When we make ice-cream, we tend to make two flavors at once because cleaning-up is the WORST afterwards. So many pots that can't go in the dishwasher. Bleh!

This time, we decided to go with drinkable flavors - Chai Tea and Coffee ice cream.

I pretty much followed Ev's chai tea recipe (for both the chai tea and the coffee) - but I ended up using the liquid chai concentrate instead of the chai latte mix since I couldn't find the mix in stores. If you can get your hands on the mix, I would recommend that over the liquid concentrate version - I ended up having to use half a cup of the chai liquid concentrate to get a strong enough chai tea flavor - but that increased the water content in the ice cream and made it a little icier than it should have been.

Chai Tea (or Coffee) Ice Cream Recipe 

(makes 1 quart)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup half and half
• 1 cup whole milk
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup chai latte concentrate (or 2 tbs instant coffee granules if you want to make coffee ice cream) 
• Pinch of salt
• 6 large egg yolks

 Directions:
1. Combine the milk, cream, sugar, chai concentrate (or instant coffee), and salt. Heat and stir mixture. Bring to a simmer and remove from heat.

2. In a separate bowl, gently whisk the egg yolks (whisking too fast will produce too many bubbles, and cause you to produce major fail ice-cream with a crumbly texture)

3. SLOWLY pour milk mixture into the eggs while stirring gently (if you pour too fast, the eggs will curdle). I typically pour the milk mixture into my measuring cup (since it has a nicer pour spout than the pot), and I don't add more than 1/3 cup at a time, slightly increasing the volume each time as you increase the temperature of the custard mixture.

4. Pour mixture back into pot and heat on low setting while continuously stirring. The mixture should thicken up slightly and coat the back of your spoon - this shouldn't take more than 3-5 minutes.

5. Strain out any excess egg bits and let the mixture cool to room temperature

6. Cover and chill for at least 4 hours (preferably overnight)

7. After chilling, strain mixture again and churn in your ice-cream maker for about 15-20 minutes. You'll most likely have to leave the finished ice-cream in the freezer overnight to harden a bit more.

And there you have it! Chai Tea (or Coffee) ice cream! For some reason, the coffee ice cream also came out more icy than expected (as you can see in the picture) - will have to play around with the milk/half and half/whipped cream ratio in the future.

Chai Tea Ice Cream

Coffee Ice Cream