Comfort food: Black Walnut Ice Cream (and pistachio)

Most people wouldn’t put black walnut and “delicious” together. Black walnuts may LOOK like English walnuts, but the very first bite mugs your mouth with a musky, who-died-on-my-tongue putrescence. Ugh...

Eating ICE CREAM with those things? “Spit me out, NOW.”

Hush a minute. Ignore your yammering brain, close your eyes, and TASTE. If you do, you’ll quickly realize that black walnut ice cream is incredible. I’ve finally perfected the recipe, thanks to The Resident Carpenter.

The RC grew up the middle child of a very large family, where the best way to get more than your fair share of a treat was to love whatever your siblings didn’t. Nathan’s dad was apparently the sole black walnut ice cream lover in the family, so The RC acquired the taste.

I mostly knew black walnuts from my preteen midwestern years: Black walnut trees grew all over, staining the landscape with their greeny-black botanical bombs. They made great wargaming missiles, since they were hard and heavy enough to throw and got your opponent all brown and stinky. Their semi-permanent stains invoked round after round of pioneer-woman-coloring-yarn scenarios that got me in trouble with Mom. (apparently it’s a bad idea to use her best knitting wool for test samples)

Mom was the black walnut ice cream lover in our family; had I known that it was made with walnut bombs, it would have gone the way of her other favorites: Pickled pigs feet and cornbread mushed into buttermilk and served with a sweet pickle. But she cannily scooped out her own bowl without offering me any. Thinking it was adults-only stuff, I demanded a share. Mmmm…I was hooked.

Commercial ice cream makers don’t seem to think much of black walnuts so it’s damnably hard to find in stores. A few weeks ago, though, ordering nuts for our squirrel clan (Willow, Butch, Sundance, Cassidy, Douglas, and a new Willow-daughter that the RC has yet to name), I came across black walnut pieces on nuts.com.

Hmmmmmmmm. I’d been thinking about exotic ice cream flavors ever since  our across-the-street neighbor Kim gifted us with a whole carton of expensive, hand-packed ice cream from Salt & Straw, a boutique ice creamery I’ve always wanted to try. “I got the wrong flavor; I really don’t like eating bugs,” she explained.

Bugs?

Turns out Salt & Straw makes bug ice cream. Matcha-flavored with mealworms and crickets, to be exact.* I’m not into floor-sweep flavors, so pretty much decided against EVER visiting S&S..but it got me to thinking about those black walnuts.

“I’ve always wanted to do a really good black walnut ice cream…” I mused.

“You like black walnut ice cream?” Nate exclaimed, “That’s my childhood favorite! I can never find it…”

Whoa! BOTH of us liked black walnut ice cream, so I had bags of incentive to make it. I ordered the black walnuts, snatched them away from bushier-tailed family members, then combed the web for good ice cream recipes.

The best lived on a really great website, Hank Shaw’s honest-food.net. He’s the author of Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast, a combo cookbook/identification bible for modern hunter-gatherers.

Like most great recipes, his ice cream is simple: Black walnuts, a bit of sugar, cream, milk, half a vanilla bean, and egg yolks. I tweaked it a tad (of course) and came up with an ice cream that’s pale gold, heavily redolent of vanilla, but with that distinctive black walnut scent. It’s richly creamy, a tiny bit exotic, and utterly delicious.

It should be started the day before you actually want to make it. You’ll need at least 12 hours (preferably 24) to allow the vanilla and walnuts to fully infuse the cream.

Black walnut ice cream

Ingredients

• 2 cups fresh, heavy whipping cream
• 2 cups fresh whole milk
• 1 1/4 cups chopped black walnuts (NOTE: Mom felt this would be better with fewer nuts…so you might want to start with 3/4 cup and work your way up….)
• 2/3 cup sugar
• Pinch each of cardamom and FRESH nutmeg
• 4 egg yolks
• 1 tablespoon of vodka (or thereabouts)
• 1 vanilla bean
• 1/2 teaspoon excellent (REAL) vanilla extract. A word about that extract: I actually use vanilla paste from Stavoren Trading Co., a little family enterprise. It’s a little more difficult to work with than extract, but has maybe ten times the flavor. Try the Mexican paste, it’s amazing. They also sell really fresh vanilla pods–if the Ecuadoran pods are in stock, they’re so vanilla-rich that it’s crystallized on the outside, too.

Hardware

• Heavy 3-4 quart saucepan
• Big strainer
• One big bowl (able to hold about 2.5-3 quarts) and a smaller bowl
• Wooden spoon
• Whisk
• Candy thermometer or infrared thermometer gun
• Ice cream freezer. I have one of those Cuisinart ice-jacketed freezers that makes small quantities of ice cream (fill it to the recommended line and you will wind up with soft-serve ice cream exploding all over the floor). It can turn out great ice cream in 20-25 minutes, but the quantities are so small I’m not sure I recommend it over a cheap hand-crank or powered-crank freezer that you fill with ice and salt. 

Process

1. In your saucepan, mix the whipping cream, milk, and sugar together, whisking lightly (you’re not whipping it, you’re just getting it a tiny bit frothy).
2. Dump in the black walnuts and turn the heat on low, stirring constantly, until steam starts coming off the mixture. (It should be doing this while you’re stirring–if you let it sit without stirring it’ll start glooping and bubbling, which you don’t want). The temperature should stay between 165-170 (and not go above) for about five minutes.
3. Remove from the heat and add the vanilla extract, cardamom, and nutmeg, stirring well until mixed in.
4. Slit your vanilla bean down the middle lengthwise, then scrape all the seedy goo out of the middle. Stir the goo and pods into the cream mixture.
5. Cool, then refrigerate overnight, or up to two days.
6. Strain the cooled mixture into a bowl. It should be a beautiful ecru color. (There is a LOT of cream in this recipe, which can clump when chilled. You may need to gently heat the mixture to loosen things up before you strain it.)
7. Pick out the vanilla pod pieces from the strainer and discard, then move the vanilla-seed-and-cream-covered walnuts into a separate bowl.
8. Transfer the strained cream mixture back into the saucepan and return to low heat, stirring until it reaches 160-170 degreesF and is steaming very lightly.
9. Put the egg yolks into a bowl and whisk until they’re just starting to form a ribbon.
10. 

    Infusing the black walnuts and vanilla bean into the cream mixture

    Slowly dribble about a quarter-cup of the warm cream mixture into the yolk bowl, whisking vigorously the whole time. When that’s mixed in, slowly dribble in about another half-cup or so, continuing to whisk. (You’re tempering the eggs so that they don’t scramble the moment they hit the hot cream. When the outside of the bowl feels very warm, you can dump the egg mixture back into the pan with the rest of the cream.)

11. Cook the mixture over very low heat for 5-6 minutes, making sure it never gets past 170 degreesF, then remove from heat. The thickness of the custard (yep, you’re making custard) depends on how long you cook it. I get the creamiest, most indulgent ice cream by letting the custard get a little thicker than recommended, about like a loose cake batter.
12. Remove from the heat, and stir in more vanilla (if you like) as well as the vodka. The vodka will act like antifreeze, preventing formation of sugar crystals, so that the ice cream stays rich and creamy. You won’t taste that little bit in the final recipe, but if you’re completely against it, you can substitute 1 tablespoon of corn syrup for 1 tablespoon of sugar and it will be (almost) as creamy. You could also substitute a nut liqueur such as nocino (green walnuts), amaretto (almond), frangelico (hazelnut), or hazelnut schnapps. I stick with vodka; since it doesn’t bring its own flavor to the party it works for any frozen dessert. 
13. Let the custard cool down completely, then refrigerate until you’re ready to churn the ice cream. It will thicken up–it’s a custard, after all–until it’s about like loose sour cream, and you’ll be scraping every last bit out of that bowl.
14. Put the custard into your ice cream maker, and turn it on. I have no idea how long it will take to freeze, it depends on your freezer, but you want to get it to a very soft consistency, about like soft-serve ice cream or softened butter.
15. Dump in your cold, cream-soaked walnuts and continue to run the freezer until the ice cream is too stiff to churn.
16. 

    Sliding the slightly cooked black walnuts into the ice cream when it’s at the soft-serve stage

    Scrape the ice cream into a bowl or container put in the freezer to ripen and firm up for an hour or two (or preferably overnight) but I’ve never seen anyone wait that long.

I’m playing around with alternatives, such as dumping in ribbons of caramel or chocolate when adding the walnuts toward the end.

As I mentioned, this is a VERY chunky ice cream that uses nearly twice the nuts (2/3 cup) recommended by Mr. Shaw in his original recipe. The walnut infusion period softens them so they’re not hard or crunchy at all, but if you want more silk and less chunk, add maybe half the nuts and see what you think before adding the rest.

…which makes me think of OTHER alternatives: What I if pralinized some additional black walnuts, and stirred them in at the last minute? How would this recipe work for other nuts? Pistachios? Toasted almonds? Hazelnuts?

Yup, pistachio

Pistachio ice cream uses much the same technique, but it’s a bit more involved, mostly thanks to nut preparation. The recipes typically recommend Sicilian pistachios for the stronger flavor, but our good ol’ California pistachios work just as well (I think). You’ll want a pound of them, raw and unsalted.

You CAN use roasted/salted pistachios, but the skins need to be removed, which is a PAIN. It’s still a pain with the raw nuts, but more doable. Dump the raw nuts into boiling water for one minute (ONLY one minute), then drain and place inside a folded towel. Rub HARD and the skins will sorta come off on the towel. Kinda. About a third of the nuts will still need to be peeled. Place them on a baking sheet and coat with about a teaspoon of oil (vegetable works, but if you’ve got hazelnut or almond oil, yay!), and toast at about 250F.

Note: I tried toasting the pistachios with a little peanut oil instead of vegetable or other nut oils. It’s delicious, but gives the ice cream an almost peanut butter tang. If you want pure pistachio flavor, stick with pistachio or veggie oil.

Watch them carefully–they should start to lose some of the green color and get a bit golden–if you can smell nuts roasting you’ve cooked them too long. I find that they don’t really crisp up and become crunchy that way, so I tend to dump them into a skillet to finish toasting. They won’t be as soft as pine nuts, but they should be firm. Chop them up.

Set half the nuts aside. Put the other half into the cream-sugar-vanilla bean mixture as above, so that they infuse flavor into the cream. Oddly, the pistachio flavor can be very subtle unless you also add in a strip of lime zest and/or a sprig of rosemary–they contain aromatics that enhance the pistachio flavor.

When you strain the cream mixture the next day, discard the soaked nuts. When it’s time to add the nuts to the ice cream, use the second, unsoaked half. Otherwise, proceed as above.

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*The Resident Carpenter, having already tasted many bugs as part of his be-a-wild-survival-man-in-the-wilderness thing, actually gave the stuff a try, and made a face. “I don’t mind eating bugs,” he admitted, “But I draw the line at bug-flavored dessert.”