Some things are not meant to be, and lomboy (Java plum) ice cream is one of them. Or at least the kind I made with the ones a cousin gave us. The fruits might have looked gorgeous (see photo above), but they were wickedly apud (astringent), with not enough sweetness to compensate.
And I was so excited to see them. The last time I ate lomboy (duhat to you Tagalogs) was in the late 1970s when my maternal grandfather was still around. He would take us to the family farm in his lemon of a car, and my sister and I would wander the grounds while Lolo went about his business with the saop (tenants). I still remember the stand of Java plum trees on a hilly slope a ways back from the main house, with fruits easily twice as big as the ones I used. And sweet — or so my increasingly unreliable memory tells me.
Lord I’m old.
I’m aware there’s little to no chance that no-churn ice cream will ever approach the quality of the kind made without shortcuts. The words “good enough” are often trotted out, which to me is like saying I might as well be content with the results I’ve had so far. I’m not, and so I keep searching for that extra step or ingredient to get no-churn ice cream to that level of ice-cream-ness — you know, just in case there is (paging Kenji López-Alt).
On top of heavy cream, this latest version had egg yolks. It took extra time and effort to make the zabaione (light custard), especially as my hand-held electric mixer overheated halfway into the process, so I had to finish using a wire whisk over a clumsily rigged double boiler. Was it worth it? I would say so. This version was less dense and more rounded on the tongue — and the latter definitely wasn’t courtesy of the Java plums; although I steeped the fruits overnight in sugar (and rum), then cooked the mixture, that still wasn’t enough to remove their astringency.
The color’s amazing, though. Reminds me of someone. Also that ice cream is a blank canvass, only as good as what you bring to it. Take Nestle’s. Or, lately, Selecta’s. Did I see you flinch?
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