Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream Book

Last year on a trip to San Francisco I visited a little ice cream shop called Humphry Slocombe (http://www.humphryslocombe.com) after seeing it on Bizarre Foods and reading some reviews online. What looks like a pretty nondescript storefront houses some of the best and most inventive ice creams I've ever had. Flavors range from Foie Gras ice cream sandwiches, "Honey Thyme", and Secret Breakfast (Vanilla ice cream with corn flakes and bourbon). I was extremely excited to see a couple weeks ago that the owners of Humphry Slocombe had written and released a cookbook detailing the history of the shop, their recipes, and their individual back stories. The book is also very funny with stories of how some of their creations came to be, I was laughing out loud reading the description of "Tranny Smackdown."

Here is the official "Book Description" from Amazon:
With more than 310,000 Twitter followers, a heaping helping of controversy, and a rich supply of attitude and humor, Humphry Slocombe is not your average ice cream shop. Yet the ice cream is what matters, and they make it in dozens of glorious, unique, and delightful flavors. This tasty book collects 50 recipes for these idolized and iconoclastic flavors, as well as surprising sundae combinations and popular toppings such as marshmallow and crumbled curry cookie. More than 50 color photographs, dozens of graphics and drawings, and first-person essays and scenes from the shop present a delicious foray into this scoop of San Francisco's incredible food scene.

I would highly recommend picking up the book at the very reasonable price of $13 if you enjoy making ice creams. Found here: http://www.amazon.com/Humphry-Slocombe- ... 1452104689

I've been experimenting with their recipes, and will post a few on this thread for anyone who might be interested.

Humphry Slocombe created this ice cream in honor of the first Harvey Milk Day (May 22, 2009) in California. As many now know thanks to the 2009 film staring Sean Penn, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay official to be elected to a public office. This ice cream is still served on Harvey Milk day.

Harvey Milk and Honey is a milk flavored (Vanilla is a word not spoken in the HS book) ice cream with a healthy dose of honey and graham crackers. The cookbook offers a homemade graham cracker recipe, but I blatantly cheated and bought store made crackers instead.

Here are the ingredients ready to go:


When making ice cream, the first steps are pretty consistent and don't change much. Essentially, you warm up the cream and milk (and in this case some salt) in a large saucepan. In another bowl, you whisk together the egg yolks and sugar. Then while whisking constantly, you ladle a little bit of the warm cream/milk base (about half of it in all) into the sugar/egg mix in order to "temper" the eggs. If you just dumped the eggs into the hot mix the eggs would quickly cook and you would have something closer to scrambled eggs than ice cream.

After the tempering process you combine back into the saucepan and heat until ~175* for a few minutes over medium-high heat. The Humphry Slocombe book states that you can either tell its done by listening for your spoon scraping along the bottom of the pan, or you can just use a candy thermometer...which I set up below for a more accurate count:


The mixture is then strained into a large bowl set in an ice bath to rapidly cool. At this point, the honey (I used raw honey I had on hand) is mixed in. I placed the mixture into the fridge overnight to settle and cool completely. The next day it came out looking like this:


At this point I have to admit that I actually made this recipe twice. The first time I put the cooled mixture into our kitchen-aid ice cream attachment, which hadn't worked great the last couple times I had tried to use it, and when I mixed in the Harvey Milk and Honey mixture is barely froze and the consistency was horrible. So I decided to invest in a Cuisinart stand-alone ice cream maker (as suggested in the book) specifically for this project. Here is the ice cream maker in action just after the ice cream was loaded in:


After about 15 minutes the mixture started to thicken up:


Once the ice cream has thickened up considerably, chopped graham crackers are mixed in. I then moved the mixture into a Tupperware container and placed in the freezer to firm up a bit.

And here is the final product:


The Verdict

Pretty fantastic. In my opinion this ice cream is all about the honey, which is really the prevalent flavor and fairly strong. I used a really high quality honey and I'm glad I did as I'm not sure the processed mixture from a bear shaped plastic container would of tasted quite the same. The graham crackers added some nice texture and were a nice addition although next time I think I will try to make them from scratch.

One of Humphry Slocombe's most popular flavors is called "Secret Breakfast" which is the only flavor that is offered daily. It's also been featured a fair amount in the media and could almost be described as their signature flavor. While searching the internet for more information or backstory on the flavor, I did find this video from the cooking channel which features Jake making Secret Breakfast in the back of Humphry Slocombe: http://www.cookingchanneltv.com/videos/secret-breakfast-ice-cream-video/89680.html

When I visited myself last year, I hadn't yet heard about the flavor, but when the flavor was described to me as "bourbon and cork flake flavored ice cream" I went for it. I'm glad I did because it was incredible and unlike any other ice cream I'd ever had. In many ways this recipe is the reason I bought the Humphry Slocombe cookbook, why I want to make every recipe in the book, and why I started this blog to document.

Getting started. Yes, that's a bottle of Maker's Mark (I didn't know until later that HS uses Jim Bean) and a box of corn flakes:


What's the "secret" to the Secret Breakfast? When I searched around for recipes prior to the HS book being released, I saw quite a few that essentially just dumped corn flakes into the ice cream toward the end of the process. The problem with that is the corn flakes would quickly become soggy after sitting in the not 100% frozen ice cream. In order to ensure crispy "corn flakes" HS makes corn flake cookies, which are baked to the edge of burnt. Outside of the ice cream, they essentially taste like sugar cookies with corn flakes:


The cookies are then chopped up:


And then dumped into the mixing, nearly complete, ice cream:


After placing the ice cream back into the fridge for a little bit to solidify a bit more and to reach a more firm consistency, here is the final product:


Verdict

Pretty fantastic. The bourbon flavor is stronger than I remember, but is really good when mixed with the v@n*lla flavored ice cream and corn flake cookies. It's a pretty "light" ice cream in my opinion, and tasted really good sitting outside on a warm spring night after dinner. We ended up with way more cookies that we needed for the recipe, so we decided to freeze the extras and have them on hand for when this is make again.