Chik-a-licious is delicious

My favorite dessert place in New York is Chikalicious, which is a cute little hip Japanese dessert bar in the East Village.  Whenever a friend or relative is visiting and we find ourselves down there, we head over after dinner to try some fabulous unique creation.  They offer a three course tasting menu for $12 - you get an amuse bouche, a main course, and some petit fours.  The store is run by a very cute little Japanese woman named Chika, who invents all the desserts, and her husband Don, who deals with the front of the house.

My cousin and his girlfriend were in town tonight.  Once she revealed her passion for ice cream and desserts, I couldn't resist taking them to my favorite spot.

Since this is an ice cream blog, I'm going to focus on their amazingly flavorful ice creams. Tonight we had a pear sorbet with our amuse bouche.  It was like biting into the freshest most delicious frozen pear you've ever tasted.  With our main dishes, we had an egg nog ice cream with the sweet potato brulee, a roasted banana ice cream with the banana trifle, and pink peppercorn ice cream with the famous chocolate tart.

The pink peppercorn is by far my favorite.  It has a slightly spicy, slightly sweet quality.  They go very well with citrus and I find them to be quite floral.  Since discovering pink peppercorns at an old restaurant I worked at, I have loved them. Upon doing more research, I learned that pink peppercorns are actually a type of dried berry from the Baies rose plant.  Their flavor is incredibly unique.  I made my own pink peppercorn ice cream a year or so ago after being inspired by Chika.  It's a flavor I would definitely like to re-visit soon.

The roasted banana ice cream had a deep banana flavor, but you could taste the warmth and heartiness to the fact that the bananas were roasted. It was a heavier flavor than your typical banana ice cream.

The egg nog ice cream was the one disappointment.  I couldn't quite get a strong egg nog flavor. Granted, my experience with egg nog is the store bought pre-made stuff.  But there wasn't enough nutmeg or spice or something.  It was incredibly creamy, but not as strong in flavor as 

I prefer my egg nog.

The exciting thing about chika's ice cream (besides the fact that they are incredible) is that she uses a little machine called a Pacojet.  This is something I heard about for the first time     

earlier this year.  It almost looks like a coffee maker of sorts and what it does is basically purees and freezes anything.  You add fresh fruit and a custard, for instance, and in a matter of minutes the machine chops it up, freezes, and whips it.  And then you have the creamiest. intensely flavored ice cream imaginable.  Or you can add parsley, water, and sugar and you have parsley sorbet.  

It certainly opens up the lines for creative and bizarre ice cream flavors - both sweet and savory.  And as much as I'd like to get my hands on one of these expensive machines, I almost feel like it's cheating.  It takes away the exciting process of figuring out how to get the flavor into the ice cream.  It does a lot of the work for you.  

However, in a business sense, it does make things a lot easier and faster.  I think I want to try one out for myself before I make a full judgement.  And anything that allows you to make bizarre, unique ice cream flavors certainly piques my interest. 

Gingerbread... and butterscotch??

I found this recipe years ago for some delicious gingerbread butterscotch cookies.  I've been making them ever since and they are always a buttery, rich hit at all Christmas parties.  Well, the next logical step is to turn these cookies into ice cream...

I used most of the ingredients from the cookies except the butter and flour.  I decided to mix the spices and the molasses with the eggs before adding it to my creme anglaise.

Now one of the biggest criticism I receive on my ice creams is that the texture turns out grainy or icy.  I've thought about why this could be and it might be because I haven't been using enough eggs to give it that silky creamy quality.  I tried using three eggs this time, as opposed to my usual one.  Well, I either got too concerned with my candy thermometer or wasn't diligent enough with my stirring because the eggs started to cook.  That hasn't happened to me in a while.  I strained the mixture, but think I lost the possibility for that silky texture.

Sure enough, some people complained that it was too icy and that there were lots of little ice crystals.  The other big complaint was the combination of the gingerbread and the butterscotch chips.  Almost everybody agreed that the ice cream didn't need the butterscotch.  I always thought it was a nice surprise sweetness in the cookies, but I guess it didn't work so well in the ice cream.  Maybe a homemade butterscotch swirl would work a little better.  Or maybe gingerbread has enough flavor on its own without complicating with the butterscotch.

One of my next projects will be to figure out why my ice creams usually end up grainy.  I have to try to add more eggs without ruining the creme anglaise and also have to consider the possibility of my ice cream maker being the problem.  My cheap cuisinart home ice cream maker can only go so far, I'm sure.

Heaven at last

So I've been thinking about starting this blog for some time.  And now I find myself sitting here the day after Christmas pretty much wasting my day away and I thought "what a time to finally begin this thing!"  So here it is... my first ever blog post.

This is a blog about ice cream, sorbet, frozen yogurt, gelato, sherbert, granitas, and any other frozen treat.  Everybody loves frozen treats in some form or another.  I always knew how much I loved ice cream, but it wasn't until the last two years or so that I really became obsessed.  It all started with one fateful Thanksgiving when I decided to make ice creams from scratch.  I soon realized I could make any flavor ice cream I wanted.  That was the part that really turned me on.  Some would turn out not so good (turkey), some were strangely delicious (grapefruit horseradish sorbet), and some were absolutely incredible (banana cream pie).  I soon began putting all my creative energy into ice cream and am now currently in the very early stages of opening my own ice cream business.  

But in the meantime, I will continue to create ice cream, seek out the best shops, and dream of one day finding ice cream heaven.