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.