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We love dulce de leche ice cream. Real dulce de leche ice cream, that made with dulce de leche itself, not the vanilla ice cream with caramel swirls which Haagen Daz tries to pass on as dulce de leche ice cream. Unfortunately, the real stuff is not easy to get.
There is an Argentine ice cream store, Tango Gelato, in San Francisco (they used to be in Fruitvale but they moved!) and their version is pretty good though not as delicious as the stuff in Argentina. Of course, given how different milk tastes in the US I know it’d be impossible to make the real thing, but I’d like to approximate it.
So my new project consits in trying different recipes until I find one I really like. I started with a very simple one – Ben & Jerry’s sweet cream recipe substituting dulce de leche ice cream for some of the cream. Didn’t work well. It doesn’t taste enough like dulce de leche, which doesn’t surprise me as it’s very heavy in cream. Supposedly, cream dulls the taste buds.
Tomorrow I’ll try something else.
Meanwhile, here is the recipe for this one:
Dulce de Leche Granizado
-2 eggs
-1/3 cup sugar
-2 cups cream
-1 cup milk
-1 cup dulce de leche
-1/2 cup shredded dark chocolate
Whisk eggs until fluffy, whisk in the sugar until disolved, whisk in cream and milk. In a separate bowl, whisk dulce de leche with 1 cup of the cream mixture until well blended. Add dulce de leche mixture to milk mixture. Freeze according to manufacturers instructions. Two minutes before it’s done add the shredded chocolate. Put in a sealed container and freeze until it hardens.
After the bite of chicken Escabeche I got at Patagonian Gourmet, I was in the mood for more, so I tried making my own. The recipe that follows (from an Argentine site) is quite simple. It’s nowhere as tasty as the one at Patagonian, but it’s quite good and addictive! I still haven’t served myself a dish, I keep going back to the pot and taking pieces of chicken (don’t worry, I only made it for Mike, Mika and I – we share our germs in many other ways)! We are going to have a lot of wasted veggies (next time I’ll use less). Mika also liked it, despite the vinegary tasty.
A word of caution, I cooked the chicken for 2-3 hours and that was probably too much (or at too high temperature). You may want to check the texture after 1 1/2 hours.
I just posted two reviews from my trip to Los Angeles.
We stopped at Mike’s Roadhouse Cafe in Kattleman City in our way to LA. It was just OK, better than Denny’s. They have a beautiful collection of (overpriced) pedal cars, however.
In LA, we had dinner at Patagonian Gourmet, a whole-in-the-wall Argentine restaurant in Tarzana that was actually quite good. They have a killer chicken escabeche that you have to try.
I love cheese and, like with almost everything else, my taste for cheese has expanded as I’ve aged. I’m almost to the point where I’d be willing to try those stinky cheeses my father loves so much. Michaella is a dairy-fiend herself and she is extremely fond of cheeses. She likes almost all of them, though I recently found out she is not fond of chevre. Her dad didn’t use to like it either, and I think Mika has inheritted Mike’s taste in food as well as his looks and personality.
I don’t know very much about cheese, however, so I figured I’d start writing about different cheeses I tried so that I could remember which ones I liked and disliked and why. I’m starting with Stilton, even though I wrote a little bit about that cheese in my posting below, as it’s a new cheese I tried today.
Stilton is a blue cheese from England. I found it at Safeway (Clawson brand) for $13 a lb. I really like it. It’s quite creamy for a blue cheese, though it can crumble, and has an intense flavor that is still less pungent and bitter than other blue cheeses (like Roquefort or Gorgonzola). Indeed, it doesn’t taste completely as a blue cheese – it even reminded me a little of gruyere. It was good in the blue cheese burgers I made, but it’s actually one blue cheese I’d eat by itself. Indeed, it’s recommended that you enjoy it alone with a glass of port, though I think it would also go great with the cherry preserves we had at Piperade. This is definitely a cheese I could serve as part of a cheese course or, as the British (used to?) do, as a finish to a meal.
Here is some more info I found on the web about it:
I made these for an impromptu Memorial Day BBQ today. They are quite good. As I learned, make sure to not overstuff them. I use ground buffalo as a healthier alternative to ground beef but you can use ground beef just as well. I made them with Stilton cheese, it was the first time I tried it and I was very pleased with it, it’s less intense and yet creamier than other blue cheeses. You can substitute with your favorite blue cheese, of course.
-1 lb ground buffalo
-1/2 tsp. Worcestershire Sauce
-1/2 tsp. dried mustard
-1/2 tsp. salt
-1/4 tsp. ground black pepper
-a dash of Tabasco
-2 oz Stilton blue cheese
Mix the ground buffalo with the Worcestershire sauce, the dried mustard, the salt, pepper and Tabasco. Hand-form 8 equal size patties. Put 1/2 oz of cheese in the middle of a patty, cover it with another patty, press the sides until the cheese is completely covered and flatten with a spatula. Repeat making 3 more patties. Grill for about 5 minutes on each side. Serve on a burger bun with your favorite fixings.
I haven’t posted anything to this blog, or my other one, because I’ve been gone for the last week. Mike and I went down to Southern California, left Mika with my parents and took a 4-day cruise. It was relaxing and the food decent, though not actually good 🙂 I hope to write more about the cruise and the food I’ve had lately, we’ll see if I can manage the time.
Anyway, I just posted two reviews of San Leandro restaurants that I wrote before I left.
The Blue Dish is a small deli-like restaurant serving light American, Middle Eastern and Mexican menus. We tried the Middle Eastern stuff (prepared by a Latino cook) and our experience was mixed: Mike like his salad while I felt my shawerma was overwhelmed by the tahini sauce.
The Sandwitchery is, as it name suggests, a sandwich joint. They offer a large variety of sandwiches which are better, and more expensive, than those at the chains (there is a Subway and a Quiznos nearby) but otherwise not remarkable.
On a final note, I’ve heard that Cafe Zula closed. I’m not surprised given its out-of-the-way location and a menu that did not justify its prices. Unfortunately it isn’t going to be replaced by another (better) restaurant, Trader Sports has expanded into that space.
My two latest ice cream experiments have come straight out of the Ben & Jerry Ice Cream & Dessert Book. They’ve been great!
Saturday I made strawberry ice cream for my birthday party. I made it “chunky” by adding the strawberries in the last five minutes and put some cookie/chocolate crumbs for good measure. Everyone liked it, some people thought it tasted like strawberry short cake. I’ll certainly make it again this summer.
Just now I finished a batch of kiwi ice cream. The description in the book “exotic, subtle flavor for the true connoisseur” wasn’t too encouraging but I bought a bunch of kiwis at the farmer’s market and I wanted to give it a try. It is delicious! I find it very refreshing. I made it with half-sugar/half esplenda. The one minus is that it hurts my tongue when I eat it – but I think I may have a minor allergy to kiwi (I have similar experiences when eating some nuts).
Anyway, here are the recipes as I made them. You will need an ice cream maker with at least a 1.5 qt. bowl.
=Strawberry Ice Cream
1 basket fresh strawberries, hulled & sliced
1/3 cup sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups heavy or whipping cream
1 cup milk.
Mix strawberries with the sugar and lemon juice and let stand in the fridge for at least 1 hour.
Whisk the eggs until light and fluffly, about 2 minutes. Gradually add the sugar and whisk in until well combined. Add the cream and milk and mix well. Add the juice from the strawberries and whisk.
Mash the strawberries into a pure and set aside.
Transfer the mixture into the ice-cream make and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions. A couple of minutes before it’s done, add the mashed strawberries. Make sure they combine well. Transfer ice cream to an airtight container and freeze until hard.
=Kiwi Ice Cream
6 kiwis
2 tbsp. sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup esplenda
2 cups heavy or whipping cream
Mash the kiwis, mix with 2 tbsp. of sugar and let stand in the fridge for at least 1 hour.
Whisk the eggs until light and fluffly, about 2 minutes. Gradually add the sugar and splenda and whisk in until well combined. Add the cream and mix well. Add the mashed kiwis and mix well.
Transfer the mixture into the ice-cream make and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions. When done, transfer ice cream to an airtight container and freeze until hard.
I just bought a new ice cream maker, a Cuisinart ICE-20 on sale at Amazon for $50. It had gotten mixed reviews, many people were complaining that the ice cream didn’t really get too thick and was more like soft-serve. But most of them liked it and the complaints seemed generalized to all ice cream makers.
It arrived last night and I quickly put the bowl in the freezer and couldn’t wait to make ice cream. I made some today following the most simple recipe from its manual, and so far so good. The ice cream (cookies n’cream) was soft but firmer than I expected it to be. It’s now firming up in the fridge. It tasted very much like Dreyer’s. I bet Mika will be happy to have some when she gets home.
I’m already re-freezing the bowl to make some more tomorrow, I’m thinking of strawberry sorbet!
Hard boiled quail eggs are a great toddler food. They are small enough that they fit easily in a toddler’s hand and can be eaten in a couple of bites (less mess) and cute enough that they want to eat them. We find them at the San Leandro farmers market for 10 for $1. They are quite delicate, however, so often times one or two of those eggs have a broken egg shell by the time we bring them home. They are also a little bit tough to peel, the shell breaks into many small pieces. I usually rinse them after peeling them to get all the pieces of shell off.
What I usually do is hard boil a dozen at the time and then keep them, in their shells, in the fridge. When Mika needs a snack I peel one and give it to her.
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