Sara Engram - Spice Dreams: Flavored Ice Creams and Other Frozen Treats

I n Spice Dreams, Sara Engram and Katie Luber are back to transform desserts the same way they revolutionized spice cabinets with their two unique lines of organic spices: tsp spices and Smart Spice. In their previous cookbook, The Spice Kitchen, they gave us new ways to enhance everyday family meals with herbs and spices. Now theyre spicing up everyones favorite creamy, dreamy treat.

With more than fifty recipes for herb and spice-infused ice creams, sorbets, frozen yogurts, sundaes, popsicles, and other frozen treats, Spice Dreams is a decadent and wonderfully cool collection of confections that are sure to satisfy ice-cream lovers everywhere.

Also by Sara Engram and Katie Luber
The Spice Kitchen: Everyday Cooking with Organic Spices

Spice Dreams copyright 2010 by Sara Engram and Katie Luber. Photographs copyright 2010 by Maren Caruso Photography. All rights reserved. Printed in China. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, write Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

E-ISBN: 978-1-4494-0020-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009939471

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

Photography Maren Caruso Photography (www.marencaruso.com)

Photography: Maren Caruso
Photography assistant: Stacy Ventura
Photography intern: Juliette Tinnus
Food stylist: Kim Kissling
Food stylist assistant: Sarah Fairhurst
Prop stylist: Nissa Quanstrom
Design: Julie Barnes

www.tspspices.com
www.smart-spice.com

ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES
Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write to: Special Sales Department, Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

To Drew and Betsy Jiranek, for wise counsel and unwavering support, and to the Seasoned Palate team: John Dearing, Tom Shumaker, Bob Grose, Stephanie Adler, Amy Carey, Rosemary Connolly Gately, Lisa Keenan, Moira Eick, Maddie Grose, Jacob Luber, Diana Luber, John Henry Reilly, Jack Dearing, Elizabeth Dearing, Phil Luber, and Jack Reilly.

ICE CREAM . Even the name carries the promise of magic and delight. Whether you lick a cone or savor a spoonful, ice cream has a gift for surprising the palate in the most satisfying of ways. No doubt thats why ice cream comes in almost every flavor imaginable and still continues to inspire adventurous cooks. In this book, we aim to add to the variety in our own favorite waywith top-quality, vibrantly flavored, organic spices.

Spices have always brought a sense of adventure to food, allowing us to imagine ourselves in far-flung places simply by changing the seasonings in a home-cooked meal. Spices can turn a kitchen into the most globally connected room in the house, creating a culinary window on cultures around the world.

We sell and use organic spices because the organic designation provides assurance that spices and herbs are just thatpure spices and herbs without added ingredients such as anticaking agents or extraneous matter like stray stems or twigs. (Foreign matter is not tightly regulated for conventional spices.) Pure product means pure flavor, and were big on flavor.

The recipes in this book rely almost entirely on dried herbs and spices for the simple reason that they are readily available throughout the year. Occasionally, a recipe calls for a fresh herb, as in Basil Ice Cream (page 9). If you dont have a fresh herb available, you can substitute a teaspoon or two of dried for each tablespoon of fresh. If you do have the fresh herb, feel free to supplement the recipe with a teaspoon of dried as well. Using both will provide an extra depth of flavor, intensifying the taste.

Basil ice cream may be new to you, and if it is you have a sweet surprise in store. If you try this recipeand we hope you willyou may be inspired to experiment with other herbs as well. The same goes for such recipes as Dark Chocolate-Anise Ice Cream (page 24), where fennel seed, or cloves, or some other spice would work equally well. For Mango Sorbet with Cumin and Cinnamon (page 37), you could easily pair allspice and anise seed or use allspice alone.

We have a simple guideline when it comes to spicessuit yourself! In fact, we encourage you to look at these recipes as templates, suggestions for flavor combinations that might surprise and delight your inner ice-cream avatar. A good part of the fun of homemade ice cream is tweaking these formulas to your own spice preference.

There is some genuinely good commercial ice cream on the market, but nothing quite beats the thrill of tasting the homemade stuff. These days, with handy electric countertop appliances, making ice cream is easier than ever. And, of course, its still more than worth the effort. When it comes to guilty pleasures, ice cream may be the hardest to resist. Yet somehow, when you take the trouble to make your own, its hard to feel any guilt at all.

When we went into the spice business, our friend and early colleague, Nancy Meadows, posed a great idea: spiced-up ice cream, orspice cream.Nancys skill and imagination produced so manyspice creamwonders that we were persuaded that ice-cream lovers had a lot of incredibly rewarding new territory to explore. Many of these recipes are straight from Nancys repertoire. Others have been modified to standardize the recipes and, in some cases, to simplify them to encourage frequent use. For that we turned to our talented friend and culinary expert Kimberly Toqe, who seems able to make every recipe user-friendly.

For all of us at The Seasoned Palate, Inc., the past few months have involved the weighty (alas, we mean that literally) work of making and tasting many different ice creams. We have spared you some (such as green pea sorbet). Others we are delighted to share.

Like most people, we have fond memories of ice cream. Ours reach back to childhood and those backyard sessions with relatives and friends wresting with hand-cranked, and often cranky, iceenveloped canisters that seemed to take forever to turn custard into ice cream. Even then, the work involved in homemade ice cream was worth the effort.

Its still worth the effort. Theres something inherently joyful about eating ice creamand about making it, too. We find that stirring the custard, which could seem slow and laborious, is a great way to relax and go with the flowknowing, of course, that the process will yield cold comforts and creamy delights.

Sara and Katie

TIPS: a few tips:

All ice creams and sorbets should be chilled to 40F or less before placing in the icecream maker. Otherwise, your ice-cream machine will lose its chill too soon and your custard or sorbet will never get firm.

Ice cream calls for egg yolks, but dont waste those egg whites. You can place them in an ice cube tray, one compartment per egg white, and freeze them for later use. Once theyre frozen, you can store them in a resealable freezer bag.