Frozen Dessert

A lot of commercial red bean ice creams are just your basic, junky, mass-produced ice creams made with inferior ingredients like gums and thickeners, with a little of the red-bean paste called anko stirred in. Not so the following: a custard-based, from-scratch ice cream, enriched with enough anko so that you really get both its flavor and the extra creaminess contributed by its starch. The vanilla is optional; some feel it detracts from the red- beaniness, but I think it enhances it. If you want to go to town with this one, serve it in scoops sprinkled with a little matcha (brightly colored powdered green tea), and offer matcha-flavored meringues alongside; you can make them from the egg whites you'll have left over from the ice cream. Those who are allergic to dairy products can make this using canned full-fat unsweetened coconut milk: substitute 4 cups for the milk and cream.

Fresh citrus juice is ideal for making granita; it is easy to extract and it freezes particularly well. For variety, use an equal amount of any type of citrus juice in place of grapefruit. Campari lends a pleasant bitterness and dash of color to grapefruit granita; add 3 tablespoons to the proportions below. To make apple granita, puree four peeled and cored apples in a food processor with 1/2 cup water and the juice of one lemon (to preserve the color); strain, and you should have 2 cups juice. For watermelon granita, puree about 3 cups cubed melon in a processor; strain.

Because no two batches of fruit have the same sweetness, it’s important to adjust the mix before freezing. This will affect more than flavor because sugar lowers the freezing point of water; so the sweeter your mix, the slushier your sorbet. Too little sugar and the sorbet will be icy hard. Some chefs use a saccharometer (which gauges a liquid’s density by how much of the instrument floats above the surface), but a large uncooked egg stands in quite well (see step 4). Watermelon is one of the simplest flavors to make, since it requires no added water. Follow the amounts in the chart on page 485 to make the suggested flavor variations. When using only juice, you can skip the first step. Citrus fruit can be squeezed by hand. For the kiwi and pineapple sorbets, you will need to add fresh lime or lemon juice along with water in the first step. All liquids should be strained into a deep bowl or plastic container as directed. If desired, add up to 3 tablespoons of other flavorings such as liqueur before adding the simple syrup.

Custard serves as an incomparable ice-cream base. Also called French ice cream, frozen custard usually consists of a combination of egg yolks, milk, and cream. What makes it different from other ice cream, such as Philadelphia-style (which contains no egg), is the base, which is a variation of crème anglaise, a cold sauce that often accompanies soufflés, cakes, poached fruit, and meringues. (To make the sauce, simply follow the recipe below, substituting 3 cups whole milk for the skim milk and cream and omitting corn syrup; do not freeze after straining and chilling.) Unlike many store-bought versions, ice cream made from scratch has a deeply luxurious texture. It’s voluminous and soft, able to envelop whatever delectable flavors you plan to blend into it. And as long as you have an ice-cream machine, there’s not much to the preparation. It’s just a matter of cooking the custard, chilling it, and then letting the machine handle the bulk of the work. Ice cream has the best texture when it has just finished churning; it’s somewhere between soft-serve and regular ice cream. If making ice cream ahead of time, make sure to take it out of the freezer 15 to 30 minutes before serving (depending on the room temperature) to soften slightly.

Every restaurant menu has at least one or two items that can’t be taken off lest customers riot. This sundae and the Butterscotch Budino (page 272) are those items for us, which just goes to prove that caramel and salt are a winning combination. In Italy, coppetta refers to an unadorned dish of gelato, but we took liberties with the definition with this sundae. It’s a good dessert to serve to a crowd, since the recipes for the caramel, marshmallow sauce, and gelato make enough for twelve or more. To increase the yield, just increase the amount of peanuts that you toast.

Like the Butterscotch Budino (page 272), this gelato marries the sweet flavor of caramel with a touch of salt, a combination I love. It is the base of the Caramel Coppetta, a sundae composed of Marshmallow Sauce and Salted Spanish Peanuts (page 296). Even made in a home ice cream maker, it comes out dense and creamy, and I would say one of the real successes of a long gelato-making project involving a team of gelato-obsessed taste testers.

Americans think of vanilla as “plain” ice cream, the connotation often being that it is boring. But vanilla, if it’s done well, is neither plain nor boring. Although they are expensive, it’s worth the extra money to buy large, plump vanilla beans, which will impart significantly more flavor than lesser-quality beans. My favorite are Tahitian.

When we decided to take on the challenge of making real Italian gelato for the restaurants, olive oil was the first flavor I knew I wanted to make. It’s one of the most talked-about and raved-about flavors at Mario and Joe’s pizzeria, Otto, in New York. Plus, I love the flavor of olive oil so much that there was no way I would pass up an opportunity to use it in a dessert. The olive oil isn’t even cooked here, so you’ll really taste the flavor. Pull out all the stops when choosing the olive oil—and use olio nuovo when it’s available.

Stracciatella comes from the verb stracciare, which means “to tear apart.” Italians use the word for several foods, including the inside of burrata cheese, a soup in which the egg is dropped into hot broth, and this gelato, which consists of plain gelato, known as “fior di latte,” or “flower of milk,” with dark chocolate “shreds” strewn throughout. Ariana Flores, the assistant pastry chef for both restaurants, is always happy when this flavor goes back into rotation. It’s her favorite to eat, but I also think she likes the process of drizzling the chocolate over the ice cream to make the shreds. I love how plain stracciatella is—that it’s basically just milk, without even egg yolks or vanilla, which American chocolate chip ice cream generally contains—and I like the bright white color of it. If you want to make fior di latte, an Italian classic, simply omit the chocolate portion of this recipe. I especially like it topped with toasted pine nuts (page 63).

Meyer lemons are thought to be a hybrid between lemons and Mandarin oranges. They have a sweet perfume and a sweeter flavor than regular lemons. They’re originally from China, but those of us who live and cook in Southern California consider them our own. I get so excited every January when I spot these smooth-skinned citrus at the farmers’ market.

I love alcohol-flavored gelato because the alcohol cuts the richness of the dairy and also allows the gelato to get super-cold. But because alcohol doesn’t freeze, if you add too much to the gelato it won’t freeze at all. After making many versions with varying amounts of booze, we determined that the recipe below contains the maximum amount of alcohol that will freeze in a home ice cream maker. If it’s still not boozy enough for you, do as I do: drizzle a few drops of bourbon over the top.

The difference between thick, creamy Greek yogurt and the yogurt you see most often in this country is that Greek yogurt has been strained, separating the yogurt from the whey, the liquid that often sits on top of conventional yogurt. It makes all the difference in the richness and flavor of this gelato. Fortunately you can find Greek yogurt today in most grocery stores. Unlike the commercial frozen yogurts that contain a long list of ingredients whose names you can’t pronounce (none of which is yogurt), our frozen yogurt consists of nothing but yogurt and sweeteners (sugar and corn syrup) and a pinch of salt. Yogurt isn’t a traditional Italian ingredient, but in the years that I’ve been going to Italy, yogurt gelato has begun appearing in gelato cases and is now almost as likely to be seen as pistachio or stracciatella.

The key to this gelato is to use super-ripe bananas—the blacker the better. Liz Hong, one of our line cooks who tested this recipe, let the bananas ripen for over a week before they were as black as we wanted them. Roasting the bananas before puréeing them is a little trick I use to prevent the bananas from turning brown when they’re added to the base.

Another pure product, this sorbetto consists of nothing but coconut milk and sweeteners. My favorite way to eat it is alongside Chocolate Sorbetto (facing page), or with Hot Fudge Sauce (page 316) and toasted almonds, so it’s like the frozen dessert version of an Almond Joy candy bar.

This deep, dark chocolate sorbetto is so rich and thick, it’s hard to believe there is no dairy in it. There is so much chocolate in it that, while it’s smooth and delicious straight out of the maker, if you let it sit in the freezer for more than an hour or so, it becomes so hard you’d have to use a chisel to get a bite. Cacao nibs are the dry, toasted pieces of cacao beans left after the husks have been removed. I like them for the crunch and the bitter cocoa flavor they add. Cacao nibs are available in the baking section of specialty markets and from online sources, but if you can’t find them, your sorbetto will still be good plain and smooth.

We change our gelato pies throughout the seasons—we make strawberry in the summer, pumpkin in the fall. We’ve experimented with others, such as caramel, banana, and coconut. But as good as they all are, the Meyer Lemon is the standout. The graham cracker crust, candied citrus peel, and champagne vinegar sauce turn a simple, familiar dessert into one with many layers of flavor and texture. It’s one of my favorite desserts. The recipe for the graham crackers makes double what you will need for one pie, and the vinegar sauce makes even more than double what you will need, so plan to make this recipe twice within a short period.

Because the batter needs to be frozen before baking (and can remain in the freezer, covered with plastic wrap, for up to 1 month), these cakes are perfect for those unexpected moments when you need a quick dessert. Using semisweet chocolate in the truffles is essential; if bittersweet is used, the centers of the cakes will not ooze. Two tablespoons of loose tea leaves may be substituted for the tea bags in this recipe. If you use loose tea, you will need to strain the tea mixture before combining it with the egg yolks.

Two tablespoons of loose tea leaves may be substituted for the tea bags in this recipe. If you use loose tea, you will need to strain the tea mixture before combining it with the egg yolks.