SpiceDish Saturday {November}: Salt & Pepper Ice Cream

After a break, the fabulous EB of SpiceDish returns for SpiceDish Saturdays. We are thrilled to have her back. What a treat have EB share some of her fabulously creative ice cream recipes on our blog. 

I don't know if we ever mentioned that Jessie of CakeSpy introduced us (virtually) to SpiceDish when we were first starting the blog -- and we became fast friends. A couple of weeks ago, we met Jessie in Boston while she was on her book tour. SpiceDish met Jessie in San Francisco at the end of October. So, if life is going according to plan, the next meet up should be between us gals at Scoopalicious and the ab fab SpiceDish herself. It seems only natural. We can't wait...for whenever that is!

Until then, we'll take SpiceDish Saturdays. Without further ado, here's SpiceDish!

This recipe may be a little strange to some of you, but it makes perfect sense to me. I had the luck to meet Fabrizia Lanza the olive oil expert a few nights ago at a talk she gave at 18 Reasons here in San Francisco. During her talk, Fabrizia treated us to vanilla ice cream drizzled with a fine extra-virgin olive oil. The fruity/sweet combination really worked! My mind immediately went to salty/sweet and I thought that a few bits of sea salt would really have put the treat over the top. On my walk home I decided that one more element would make it unexpected and perfect: pepper. Peppercorn ice cream actually. I went home, infused cream with rainbow peppercorns, drizzled the final product with a McEvoy Ranch olive oil, sprinkled some pink sea salt for crunch and color and voila! Delicious.


Salt & Pepper Ice Cream

1 ½  cups half & half
1/3 cups sugar
1 ½   tbs mixed color peppercorns- cracked
Pinch of sea salt
3 egg yolks
High quality extra virgin olive oil (for drizzling)
Pinch of pink sea salt (for topping)

Warm the half & half, sugar, pepper and salt in a medium saucepan. Turn off the heat and cover. Let sit for an hour. Set a strainer on top of a large bowl then re-warm the mixture. Whisk egg yolks in another medium sized bowl. Add a few tbs of the warmed mixture to the yolks and whisk. Continue until all of the mixture has been whisked into the eggs then add mixture back into saucepan on a low heat. Stir constantly, scraping the bottom of pan until the mixture thickens and coats your spoon. Pour through the strainer into bowl then cool over an ice bath.  Refrigerate until completely cooled then freeze in ice cream maker.

Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with pink sea salt just before serving.

Thanks SpiceDish! Can't wait to try this one!