vanilla ice cream, pineapple, banana

Ice cream:

1 pint Half-and-Half (a product in the US, half cream and half milk)

1 pint heavy whipping cream (thicker with more milk fat than table cream)

3/4 cup cane sugar

1/16 teaspoon salt

4 jumbo chicken eggs yolks , or one pterodactyl egg yolk. ← Kidding. 

2 vanilla beans split with the goo scraped out

zest of two lemons. 

Heat all of that stuff while whisking steadily. No need to temper the egg yolks, that's nonsense. Just keep stirring or the egg yolks will set before you know it and then you'll blame me. It thickens. Cover and let it cool to room temperature. Chill in the refrigerator over night or better for at least 24 hours. This allows time for the vanilla and the lemon zest to steep like tea. The longer the better, but less than three days, obviously. Strain. Chill in the freezer to bring it as close as possible to freezing without actually allowing any ice crystals to form. If you misjudge, then take it out and allow to warm at room temperature until the ice crystals melt. Then put the mixture into an ice cream maker of any type. The idea is to help the ice cream maker as much as possible. Two pints equals a quart, but the quart volume grows as the ice cream maker incorporates air. It is even likely to overflow your machine if you are not alert. 

In this case the thickened ice cream was spooned into popsicle forms and frozen hard, but that was just for novelty. 

Ganache: 1/4 cup milk or cream + 1/4 cup dark chocolate chips. Heated to melting. stirred to combine. Adjusted to desired viscosity with either milk or chocolate. 

Conclusion: I have used this combination before, H&H + whipping cream in equal measure (which turns out to be 1/4 milk and 3/4 cream) but this time a bowl of the ice cream was overly fatty. The upper palate is coated unpleasantly with cold fat and that is off-putting, although the popsicle did not have that effect. This confuses me why this happened now but not before but it has a simple solution, less cream. 

Two vanilla beans may seem like an extravagance because they are so expensive in the grocery stores where they are treated like saffron. They're not that special. I buy them by the dozens on eBay where various grades and points of origin are  available at bargain prices. 

I could have done a better job of tapping the ice cream into the popsicle forms to eliminate all the bubbles but I couldn't see them through the opaque plastic forms. So that sure teaches me something about ... something.