Fresh Mint and Jalapeño ice cream
 
Pleasant herbal ice cream, combining the sweet freshness of mint with an invigorating "steely backbone" of jalapeño.
Ingredients
  • About 60 gr fresh mint leaves (approximately close to 3 pots), picked and washed
  • 2-3 fresh jalapeño chile peppers; chopped in pieces and with the seeds and interior taken out.
  • 500 ml (2 full cups) cream
  • 250 ml (1 full cup) milk
  • 150 gram (0.8 cup) sugar
  • 5-6 egg yolks
  • Pinch of salt
  • 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla powder or high quality extract
Instructions
  1. Warm the milk, the sugar and the cream in a sauce pan.
  2. Add the fresh mint leaves to the heated dairy-milk base. Stir and make sure that the leaves are properly immersed. Also add the chopped pieces of the jalapeños, and the vanilla.
  3. Remove from heat, put aside, and let the leaves and the peppers steep for at least 1 hour in room-temperature.
  4. Strain the infused liquid, making sure that all possible mint flavour is squeezed out of the mint leaves (washing your hands and using them to do the squeezing works very well).
  5. Discard the mint leaves and the pieces of pepper.
  6. Rewarm the mint-pepper infusion in a sauce pan on low to medium heat.
  7. Whisk the egg yolks in a separate bowl.
  8. Slowly, and while stirring constantly, add the warm infusion to the egg yolks. Return the mixture to the sauce pan.
  9. On medium to low heat, continue to heat the ice cream base while stirring with a spatula (make sure you scrape all over the bottom with the spatula), until the ice cream base has thickened somewhat (= reached about 78-82 degrees Celsius).
  10. Quickly remove the ice cream base from the heat, and cool it down as quickly as you can.
  11. Place the cooled down ice cream base in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, preferably even over night.
  12. Churn the chilled ice cream base in your ice cream maker according to instructions (or still-freeze the ice cream without a machine as discussed in my post about that).
Notes
Should you prefer to only make fresh mint ice cream, feel free to omit the jalapeño peppers altogether. Would you like to try both flavours side by side, make sure to let the peppers steep in a smaller quantity of dairy, separate from the mint leaves. When it is time to chill the ice cream base, add the pepper infusion to (a bit less than half, since the peppers also bring some dairy infusion) the mint leaves infusion. Put in the fridge, let chill and churn each batch separately.
Recipe by ICE CREAM NATION at https://www.icecreamnation.org/2011/10/fresh-mint-jalapeno-ice-cream/