My Third Week of Production

I made two ice creams on Tuesday: Blueberry-Lime and Vanilla Fudge. And today, I made Lemon Verbena Vegan Frozen Dessert.

The LV VFD is decidedly small batch and artisanal. I ended up with only nine full containers and one that's about two-thirds full, which I'll use for sampling. I made what I consider a quadruple batch—four times what someone following a recipe for a home ice cream maker would produce. In order to have justified the effort of hauling my ingredients and equipment to the club—and paying for a half day of kitchen rental—I should have octupled it.   

On Monday, I spent about five hours picking blueberries at Phillips Farms. The berries were small, and I was determined to fill two of PF's buckets. I was going to take a break for lunch, but when I saw on my phone it was already 2:30, I just kept going.

I thought the line on the buckets indicated a gallon, but I just poured quarts of water into a bucket, and the line actually marks five quarts. So I picked 2 1/2 gallons of berries.

Some areas of the just-forming berries had the loveliest pale–blue-green color.

On Tuesday, I sorted and rinsed the berries and pureed them in my blender with leaves from this here lime basil plant.

I added lime juice throughout the process, mostly to reverse browning caused by oxidation. I tried the puree after I'd emptied both buckets and used up all my basil. I thought it needed more lime flavor, so I added the zest of four limes and some more juice. I'd considered adding sugar or agave, because the berries weren't overly sweet on their own, but I didn't. And I'm glad I didn't because the final product—which got its sweetness only from the ice cream base—has a nice sweet-tart balance. And my customers who want something richer and sugarier will have that option.

There were two vanilla beans in our spice cabinet at home, so I scraped them into my ice cream base. I also poured in 4 ounces of vanilla extract. In the future, I'm going to use only extract; the beans are simply too expensive.

Here's a little ice cream biz secret I'll let you in on: The vanilla bean specks you see in commercial brands, almost without exception, though Jeni's is one, had already had their essence removed to create extract by the time they were delivered to the factory. Big producers put these flavorless vanilla seeds in their ice creams only for the sake of appearance.

I don't remember where I came across my fudge recipe; I wrote it down on a lined piece of paper many years ago and, like a bad journalist, I didn't acknowledge my source.

It's a doozie: heavy cream, brown sugar, bittersweet chocolate, unsweetened chocolate, and, to give it a nice glossy sheen, unsalted butter. Because I had several bags of coconut palm sugar—a worthy substitute for brown sugar—on my shelf of sweeteners and only one bag of brown sugar and I was making a quadruple batch of fudge, I used a combination of the two sugars, with no detectable difference in flavor.

On Tuesday, I told Sheila I had been singing "that Prince song 'Oh Sheila'" the day before in anticipation of hanging out with her in the club kitchen. Well, mostly I had been singing just those two words, because I didn't really know the lyrics. And, it turns out, I didn't know the artist: That song was a No. 1 hit, in 1985, for Prince–sound-alike Ready for the World.

I'll see you on Sunday at the Hunterdon Land Trust Farmers' Market. I'll have those three frozen desserts, plus limited quantities of Blackberry and Chocolate-Ginger VFDs and Mint Chocolate Chip and Coffee ice creams.