Oatmeal Raisin Ice Cream

I've said this here before, but one of my favorite things about food is that the possibilities of what you can do with it are virtually limitless. We are mostly constrained by tradition and lack of imagination; and it can be fun to play with people's expectations. Ice cream can be a great way to do this because it is such a tasty canvas, and people's expectations are so often constrained by what's commercially available.

That's what excited me about David Lebovitz's recipe for oatmeal raisin ice cream. I had never had or heard of oatmeal raisin ice cream. Have you? Surely you've eaten cookies by that name; but probably not ice cream. This recipe takes the cookie as its inspiration and aims to replicate the experience in oatmeal form. This, as you might imagine, is not without challenges.

The first challenge is how to get oatmeal into ice cream. Simply tossing some raw oats into a custard base is probably not the tastiest way to do this, except perhaps if one is making ice cream for horses (who eat raw oats). Lebovitz solves this problem by making an "oatmeal praline" (he actually uses "praline" as a verb, but I didn't have the heart to do that). To do this, toast some rolled oats on a baking sheet in the oven while simultaneously melting some sugar in a large skillet on the stove. Once the oats are brown and fragrant, mix them into the just-caramelized sugar. Then pour this mixture onto a silpat-lined baking sheet to harden. Once hardened, break into small bits in the food processor. Ok, problem one solved.

The second challenge is the raisins. Dumped right into the ice cream they'd freeze and be hard little bug-like rocks. The solution: moisten them with syrup, and keep them soft with alcohol. The raisins get gently cooked in a sugar syrup, to which a couple tablespoons of whiskey are added at the end of the cooking. The raisins absorb the syrup and whiskey, so they are plump and sweet; and they stay soft and chewy in the freezer.


Finally, the ice cream itself. For this, Lebovitz uses a standard egg yolk custard, but it's sweetened mostly with brown sugar for color and a deeper flavor. A healthy dose of cinnamon is added as well, which you can see speckled in the mix.

This custard is then frozen in the ice cream maker, with the oatmeal praline and raisins tossed in just as it solidifies. A delicious treat!

In other news, I'm back in Singapore...so stay tuned for some Asian photos and treats!