In Good Taste #53: Kefir ice cream

A probiotic summer treat; lime blossom's last stand; David Baddiel and Tom Lehrer

Jul 18, 2024

Well, hello there! How are you?

Good I hope. Thank you so much for being here.

(Not up for the chitchat? Completely get it. Click the email title to go to a web-based version then jump straight to the recipe or Cultural Fun.)

I’m going to keep the chat reasonably brief as I am knee deep in supper club prep. But I wanted to point you at a couple of ideas I’ve come across for using lime/linden blossom recently.

I’m not sure I’ve ever taken much notice of lime blossom before. And I certainly hadn’t thought about eating it. But then Claire Ruston aka Auntie Bulgaria mentioned drying the flowers for tea (and possibly making kombucha from it which appeals) and Mark Diacono popped up with a recipe for lime blossom syrup (and a cocktail to use it in). And I was suddenly very aware of the sweet, slightly chamomile-y fragrance wafting around every time I walked across Finsbury Park.

Some trees have finished blooming but there are still several with flowers that are good for gathering if you feel so inclined.

Recipe: Kefir Ice cream

I was about to say something about the sun coming out again so it being a good time for ice cream. But, to be honest, it’s always a good time for ice cream.

When doing my sauerkraut demo at the Great Exhibition Road Festival I was chatting to my collaborator, gut health expert Dr Maria Valdiva Garcia about the possibility of making kefir ice cream. She assured me that the kefir’s probiotic benefits would survive freezing.

I’ve made frozen yoghurt from kefir on lots of occasions. If you’ve got an ice cream maker it’s as as easy as anything. You just get some yoghurt or kefir, sweeten it and churn. It’s fine but it lacks the satisfying mouthfeel you get from an ice cream made with a custard base.

So I wanted to make a proper ice cream but using kefir. But of course, heating the kefir to make a custard would kill the probiotics. So I thought I’d make a very thick custard with half the dairy, let it cool and then add the kefir before churning.

My go-to for ice cream inspiration is usually Kitty Travers of La Grotta Ices. I’ve got a bunch of ice cream books but hers is probably the one I turn to most often and the vanilla recipe has become my go-to. It contains both double cream and whole milk so, because my kefir is make with whole milk, I tried substituting it for for the whole milk in her recipe, but not adding it until later. It worked beautifully, retaining the tang of the kefir (plus it’s probiotic goodness) but with a much creamier, more more luxurious mouthfeel than you’d get without a custard base.

Thanks to Dr Maria for the inspiration!

Ingredients

250ml double cream
1 vanilla pod, split
pinch salt
110g sugar
3 large egg yolks
375ml whole milk kefir

Method

Make the custard. Put the cream, vanilla and salt in a small saucepan and heat until steaming. Meanwhile put the sugar and egg yolks in a mixing bowl and beat until combined. Pour the hot cream over the yolks. Do this slowly, whisking constantly. Then pour the mixture back into the pan and heat gently, stirring all the while, until steaming and thickened. Pour this back into the bowl (along with the vanilla), close cover (put a piece of clingfilm across the top of the custard to stop a skin forming) and leave to cool.
Add the kefir. Once the custard mixture is cool, add the kefir. You can either churn straight away or chill overnight. I learned this “aging” technique from Kitty Travers's book and I don’t know why it works but I think you get better ice cream with a more rounded flavour if you have time to wait before you churn it.
Churn the ice cream. Put the mixture in your ice cream machine and churn until it is a soft serve texture. Then put in a container and freeze until you want to serve.

Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)

I’m excited to try this with different flavours. I’ll experiment and get back to you. But you could easily add a swirl of fruit compote when putting the ice cream in its container for a ripple effect or chuck some chocolate chips in there.
You could use milk instead of cream in the custard for a lighter version. I tried this and it was nice. Really reminiscent of a Mini Milk. But the lower fat content means it freezes very hard so needs taking out of the freezer a good 10 minutes before eating. Or else you could cut the frozen mixture into cubes and blend in a food processor for a soft serve texture.

Cultural Fun

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of David Baddiel’s My Family: The Memoir and really enjoying it. I saw the show it’s based on - My Family: Not The Sitcom - on its first run at the Menier Chocolate Factory and thought it was great.
The book is about his family but also about love and loss and human imperfection and, specifically, the idea of truth. Baddiel is obsessed with truth. As in not misleading people but also the complex truth of who we are and whether you can ever truly know another person.
The idea apparently grew out of people at his mother’s funeral telling him she was a “wonderful” woman and feeling that this pat cliché, which failed to acknowledge the trauma of her childhood escape from Nazi Germany, her selfishness and deficiencies as a parent and her long-running affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman, was an erasure, a second death.
“The only way to combat untruth is with detail,” he says. My husband often accuses me of overtelling anecdotes so I find justification in this approach!
Baddiel’s father was also a complex, damaged man and his descent into dementia another kind of erasure. In telling some very unvarnished - and often very funny - truths about both his parents, he creates a real memorial to both parents.

We went to see Tom Lehrer is teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You at the weekend. Its run at Upstairs at the Gatehouse has sadly finished now but there’s an interesting piece by Francis Beckett who wrote the show here.

My parents were into Lehrer and hand a song book which introduced me to classics like Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. I hadn’t thought about him for a while though until Tim Harford used Werner von Braun in his three part Cautionary Tales special on the V2 rocket. That sent me down a bit of a Googlehole and led to me finding the show in Highgate.

The play was framed around a fictional journalist interviewing Lehrer, trying to get to the bottom of why, at the height of his fame, he quit performing and became a maths professor at MIT and, later, the university of California Santa Cruz. But really it was an excuse to play all his wonderful songs, my favourite of which remains Vatican Rag with its perfect couplet about confession: “There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original.”

Bye! See you next week!

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