Ya-Ya’s Tea-Board

I’m a big fan of homemade ice cream. In my view, there’s no perfect weather for good ice cream - the weather is simply always perfect. Summer, winter - it doesn’t matter if the ice cream is good.
A few years back, we had weekly winter sauna meetings in New Brighton near the beach where we put an exciting new ice cream mix into the churner each week, heated ourselves up in the sauna and finished the night with a big bowl of icy goodness. These were fantastic times…

This week, the heat inspired me to put two of my passions together: tea and ice cream. Since green tea ice cream is now fairly well known even in New Zealand, I decided to experiment with a nice oolong. The result was outstanding and I would like to share the recipe with you.

A quick note about the tea: Since the main ingredients of the ice cream (milk, cream, sugar and egg) have a strong flavour of their own, it is important to chose a fairly strong tea. I chose to use our Meghma oolong, a very flavourful bio-dynamic tea from Nepal. Wuyi oolongs would be suited as well. If you want to use a light tea like green Taiwanese oolongs, you could leave out the egg yolks to bring out more of the tea flavour. If you want to make a version of the green tea ice cream that many Japanese restaurants offer, use 2 tablespoons of Matcha powder instead of the oolong tea.

Oolong Tea Ice Cream (makes about 1 litre)

Ingredients (I use organic ingredients, but regular will do):

• 2 cups of full cream milk
• 1 cup of cream
• 4 tablespoons Meghma oolong
• 4 egg yolks
• 3/4 cup of sugar
• generous pinch of salt

Add milk, cream and tea to medium saucepan and heat. Bring to near boiling (when the milk starts to bubble around the rim of the pan).

Turn off heat and let steep for 5-10 minutes (the longer, the more intense the flavour). Good quality teas shouldn’t get bitter here, but be careful with low quality teas, they can turn bitter when steeped too long.
Pour through strainer to remove the tea leaves.

In the meantime, mix sugar, salt and egg yolks and beat until the mass turns pale. Slowly add hot milk tea, stirring constantly to avoid lumps from forming.

Heat up the mixture to about 70 degrees C (avoid boiling!), stirring occasionally. It should thicken like a custard when you heat it up. When it has thickened enough (an easy test is to coat a spoon with the mix and draw a finger through the coating on the spoon; if it leaves a clear trail, it is ready!), take from stove and let cool down. Put the custard into the fridge for at least 4 hours or preferably over night.

Then, pour the mixture into your ice cream maker and churn it until the desired consistency is achieved (~30-60 minutes).

Enjoy!

If you are looking for a suitable tea to make tea-flavoured ice cream, have a look at our range of teas.

Tags [ tea ice cream | oolong | green tea | recipes ]