Chrysanthemum Ice Cream

Ice cream is like an artist's blank canvas, in an alternate world where canvas is richly delicious. Like real canvas, though, ice cream can be a base for a tremendous variety of creations -- basically any flavor you can steep in milk and/or puree and mix with a custard, and then freeze. Once you have a few basic recipes, you can try just about anything.

Somewhat surprisingly given the ease of steeping-based ice creams (like mint, ginger, etc.), we don't often see ice creams based on tea. Yes, green tea ice cream is pretty easy to get -- but I'm excluding it because it is usually made with matcha powder, and not steeped with leaves or flowers. And yet, people have been mixing tea with milk and sugar for years -- Asian milk teas, Indian Chai with milk, yummy Thai tea with sweetened condensed milk, European teas with milk, the American 'tea latte,' etc. etc.

To be fair, Googling and thumbing through books does yield a few recipes. My favorite ice cream cookbook is David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop. He's got a huge range of recipes from vanilla and chocolate standards to creative (and delicious) forays like black pepper or goat cheese. And most of them can be pretty easily tweaked to incorporate other ingredients. He includes a recipe for a steeped Black Currant Tea ice cream.

This was the basis for my experiment with chrysanthemum ice cream. I picked up a few packages of chrysanthemum tea (really just a packet of dried flowers) on a recent trip to Hangzhou, China for the CSCW conference. This is one of the areas where the tea is produced. It's typically brewed by putting a few flowers in hot water for a few minutes.

Instead, I put a handful of flowers, some milk, and a bit of sugar in a saucepan on the stove. I warmed these to about 170 degrees (to avoid filmy boiled milk), and then turned off the heat and let the leaves do their thing for about an hour. This was then stirred into some egg yolks, and cooked to form a thick yellow custard that I then mixed with some heavy cream.

Then I froze it in my nifty new(ish) ice cream maker (yes, those keeping score at home will note that i now have two ice cream makers; don't ask), and tasted it. The ice cream was richly (but not cloyingly) sweet, with just a hint of clearly identifiable chrysanthemum taste. Some more flowers or longer steeping might help get a stronger flavor, but I actually liked the subtlety of it on the end of each bite. I might try this with some other teas, too…perhaps hibiscus or jasmine.

Stay tuned for more experiments, and please let me know if you've had other experience with steeped tea-based ice creams.

Why I love Toronto's Chinatown

When I'm in Toronto and I need more than a couple dollars worth of groceries, I get on my bike (or sometimes my car) and head to Chinatown on Spadina. Many of my friends think I'm crazy for doing this, and they have some good arguments:

It's inconvenient: why bike a mile or so when there are at least 15-20 grocery stores within 5 blocks of my apartment (did you hear that, Ithaca? 15-20 grocery stores!)? It's dirty: you never quite know what you're stepping on, there are dead animals hanging in windows, and it's important to check berries for signs of mold. It's crowded and off-putting: stores are tightly packed and few people speak English.

And still others say that it's a relic of a bygone era that wasn't very nice to begin with: many immigrants with the means to do so shop at T&T (a Canadian chain that's sort of an Asian version of Whole Foods) or Pacific Mall in the suburbs, and there aren't even many markets like this left in China.

And yet, I still love it. Here's why:

It's efficient. The goal is here not to be polite, provide great service, conform to corporate policy, or work as slowly as possible until the end of one's shift. The goal, which somehow appears to be shared by everybody, is to sell a lot of stuff as quickly as possible. Classic example: if you're just buying one or two things and have exact change, just hold it up and make eye contact with a cashier who is processing somebody else's order. They'll take your money and you can go. No problem. The cash register software even supports this (they can shift between multiple simultaneous orders) at the larger stores. Ditto if the person in front of you is taking a while to pay; the cashier will start on your order and then return to the other person's. Amazing.

It's resourceful, with a refreshing sensibility that pervades everything. Nothing is wasted, and I don't feel like I'm paying for a show (note to Wegman's: the Irish music for selling St. Patrick's day beer was cute, but I'm still talking to you here).
Signs are often handwritten on cardboard. The produce isn't shiny. Stuff isn't unnecessarily refrigerated, periodically sprayed with water, or thrown away. Stuff that's ripe or very ripe is cheaper than stuff that isn't ripe yet. And they make good use of the weather: foods displayed on the sidewalk vary every day as the temperature changes (and are sometimes rotated inside to keep from freezing), and very cold days mean that all of the produce is inside, and frozen seafood is on the sidewalk. I respect that, and I'm pretty sure it saves me money too. It almost hearkens back to an era when refrigeration wasn't cheaper than labor, and energy cost real money.

Speaking of saving money, stuff in Chinatown is dirt cheap. Without getting into stereotypes, I may be genetically predisposed to enjoy a bargain (and I certainly like it a lot, even if it's not hereditary). Chinatown is very much a caveat emptor sort of world, but cheaper produce cannot be found in very many developed places on the planet. I find that I typically pay between 10 and 50% (I don't mean 10% less, I mean 10% of the price) of what similar items cost in supermarkets. Recent examples: Bean sprouts @ $.29/lb ($3.98 per lb @ Wegman's), quarts of strawberries @ 2 for $2, tomatoes @ $.59/lb, carrots @ $.39/lb, limes @ 5 for $1, atulfo mangoes @ 6 for $5, etc. It goes on and on.

It's educational. When stuff isn't clearly labeled and staff don't speak English, you very quickly learn to tell the difference between things like galangal, ginger and turmeric root (just ask anybody who tried the turmeric sorbet I accidentally made a few years ago-- oops!); thai basil, mint, rau ram and pandan leaves; etc. Yes, it's frustrating sometimes. But a bit of trial and error means sampling new foods and being better equipped for travel. I find it endlessly fascinating and there are still lots of things I haven't tried.

You can find just about anything. Durian? Sure. Rambutans? Yup. Mangosteens? Absolutely. With a little digging (and possibly some online research beforehand to find photos), it's possible to find just about anything in Chinatown.

And finally, it's fun. When I lived in Toronto, part of my routine for weekend visitors was to take them grocery shopping with me in Chinatown (and Kensington). They almost invariably loved this. Try taking your visiting friends to the supermarket with you and see what they say.