If you've never had it you don't know what a big deal it is: green tea ice cream. In Japan they have it everywhere - even in the vending machines at the airport, for your first (or last) hit - and in some places in the West you can find it, but not as often as I'd like. Turns out it's incredibly easy to make... if you have an ice cream maker. So get one, they're not that expensive.
You need two ingredients that are relatively easy to find in the UK: custard and green tea powder. Of course you can make custard, but we're being especially lazy so we use the Ambrosia brand that every Sainsbury's has. It basically consists of milk, buttermilk, sugar, a starchy thickener and vanilla flavouring so it's not even scarily artificial. I used the "low fat" version because it's, er, healthy.
The other, slightly harder to find ingredient is green tea powder, or matcha. This is really just powdered green tea leaves - not some sort of cleverly evaporated something-or-other - so what you could do is take regular green tea and grind it down to a fine powder. For example using a food processor. The one I used is a bit posh in that it comes in individual packets and it's supposedly for ice tea. But it's really just powdered green tea leaves.
For every can of custard you will need the amount of tea powder you would use for about eight cups of tea. I started out by mixing the first packets with some milk in a glas, then stirring that into the custard which I'd poured (unheated, of course) in a bowl. I then got impatient and just stirred the remaining powder straight into the custard. Worked out fine.
Once your blend has the witches' brew colour in the photo you're ready to make the ice cream. It obviously depends on your ice cream maker how you'd do that. With the one I have I created the perfect copy in under ten minutes. Delicious.
2 comments:
Wow! Great recipe. I've never made ice cream, but I'd love to try. I've heard that if you don't have an ice cream maker (which I don't) you can pour whatever you're making into ice cream (custard + green tea or say, mashed up fruit) into a flat dish (like a lasagna pan or something), freeze it and then blend with a food processor.
Yup, though it's best if you stir it once in a while - you wanna keep the ice crystals small, that's the main challenge. The faster it freezes, the better.
I saw a cooking program the other day where they whisked their ice cream "batter" in a bowl with liquid nitrogen so that it froze within seconds. That made it very, very smooth, apparently.
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