Mint Oreo Ice-cream

Mint Oreo Ice-cream
Home Cooking



Over a year ago, I bought an ice-cream machine and fell in love with that ice-cream machine. Due to unfortunate circumstances, I have only used it 3-4 times since then. The thing about my ice-cream machine is that the bowl needs to be put in the freezer 24 hours before you want to churn a batch so your freezer needs to have room.



At mum and dad's house, their freezer never had room to spare. The freezer was full of odd things from tins of green tea to a frozen gold fish (one of dad's pets that died and he was too sad to let it go or flush it down the toilet) and my ice-cream machine was left abandoned in the pantry.



Well, now I've got my own unit and my own fridge so the moment I got a chance, I decided to kick the old thing back into action.

The first (and only) obstacle was: what flavor to make?

I thought I'd start with something that whilst still unique enough to be unavailable from most supermarkets, would be conservative enough to not be a risk.

I chose mint oreo because no matter how I thought about it, I just couldn't see how it would possible go wrong.


The recipe I used for the ice-cream base is from David Lebovitz 'The Perfect Scoop' but the flavor inspiration is from Ben and Jerry's 'Homemade Icecream and; Dessert book'. I used David's recipe for plain vanilla ice-cream but substituted the vanilla bean with some vanilla extract and left out the infusion stage.

Mint Oreo Ice-cream
Makes about 1 Litre

Ingredients:

• 1 cup (250ml) whole milk
• 1/4 cup (150g) sugar
• 2 cups (500ml) heavy cream
• pinch of salt
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 4 tsp mint extract
• 6 large egg yolks
• 1 packet Oreos, crushed

Procedure

1. Warm the milk, sugar, 1 cup of the cream and salt in a medium saucepan.
2. Pour the remaining 1 cup of cream in a large bowl and set a mesh strainer over the top.
3. In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks. Slowly pour the warm milk mixture into the egg yolks, whisking constantly.4. Return the whole mix back into the saucepan and stir constantly over medium heat until the mixture thickens and begins to coat the spatula.5. Pour the custard through the strainer into the cream. Add the vanilla extract and mint extract. Cool over an ice bath (I just let it cool to room temperature before popping the whole bowl into the fridge).
6. Churn the mixture in your ice-cream machine according to the manufacterer's instructions. In the last 5min of churning, add the crushed Oreos.
7. Chill in the freezer to firm up the mixture before serving.


This ice-cream was, as expected, yum! Though it's freezing here in Toowoomba and I'm cold and have been sick with a sore throat for about a week, I still enjoyed the serving I had at lunch time.


I was worried that I put the Oreos in too early and that they'd disintegrated into the ice-cream mixture but luckily there were still generous chunks of chocolate cookie in the ice-cream.