Michigania Mint Ice Cream

And...back to Pearwise! Apologies for the very long hiatus, but other things have been taking up my time. Let's try this again and see how it goes.

For quite some time, I've wanted to make the Michigania Mint ice cream I made today. It's been an adventure many steps in the making. To start, you need to know (as many of you already do) that I've spent some part of almost every summer of my life at Camp Michigania, the University of Michigan's alumni family camp on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan.

Step one in our journey occurs at camp when I was probably 7 or 8 years old, just beyond the furthest boats in this photo. Somebody pointed out to me then that wild mint grows on the shore by that dock. Every year I've picked a few leaves of that mint and smelled it, almost as if to be sure it was still there and verify that it really is mint.

Ok, now fast forward from my that scene in my childhood to a dinner in 2005 with a few friends. We were at Tapawingo, which has since closed but at the time was one of the best restaurants in northern Michigan, located an hour or so from camp. It was an astoundingly good meal, and one of the desserts we had was a wild mint ice cream made with local mint. It was an amazing ice cream and I decided then that I needed to make something similar.

At some point since then, I realized that the mint by the boat dock was probably similar to the mint used in the Tapawingo ice cream. I decided I could probably pick a bit of it to make ice cream, but -- for a variety of logistical reasons -- it just never happened. For most of those years, I went someplace else after camp, so couldn't really store the mint until I got home. And so forth. It never happened, but I still had the goal.

Finally, in 2016, I realized that I was going directly home from camp and could finally make the ice cream. So yesterday morning after breakfast, I picked the tops off of some of the plants. (For those concerned, I only took a few leaves off of any given plant so as not to destroy them.) I put them in my cooler in some water for the ride home.

This morning, I bruised and chopped the mint (to release its oils) and steeped the chopped leaves and stems it in a mixture of heavy cream (2 cups), milk (1 cup), sugar (3/4 cup) and vanilla (1/2 bean). I brought the mix to a near boil and steeped it for about an hour, and then cooled it in a plastic container for most of the day. Then I froze it in my ice cream maker and just gave it a try. Super yummy! I'm not sure it's up to the Tapawingo standard, but I'll take it for sure.

p.s. Some may be curious about why I went with a Philadelphia-style (i.e., not an egg-based custard) ice cream here. The reason is that, with flavors that are steeped (as opposed to, say, mixing with pureed fruit or melted chocolate), I think you can get a stronger flavor. This is because you typically steep prior to mixing with the egg yolks so a greater proportion of the liquid actually has flavor.