When Joe and I were in school in Missoula, there was this great little ice cream place just across the river from campus. It was one of the places I loved going on the times did and have a lot of fond memories of times we went, just the two of us or in bigger groups. It changed hands and became less of a college-kid friendly place (read "restaurant that was too expensive for these college kids") and at some point I think they stopped serving ice cream.
My absolute favorite flavor of ice cream that they served was Mexican Chocolate. They didn't serve it all year round as they claimed it was a "winter flavor". It was an amazingly creamy chocolate ice cream with a hint of cinnamon. It was seriously the best ever. And I have never seen that flavor served anywhere else. Fine...I will just have to learn to make it myself.
We have an ice cream maker that we have had for about 10 years and has been used exactly 3 times, including most recently my first attempt of making Mexican chocolate ice cream. I looked up a bunch of different recipes and really wanted to try the easiest one first. I was really wanting to avoid recipes with tons of heavy cream and egg yolks (for obvious reasons) and found a pretty simple one at Poppytalk. I pretty much followed the recipe, with the exception of a few things.
Ingredients
8 oz Mexican chocolate
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cups whole milk
Directions
1. Chop the Mexican chocolate as finely as you can and dump it into a medium saucepan, along with the cinnamon, sugar and salt.
2. Pour in the milk and warm until everything is well dissolved, whisking occasionally.
3. Strain the liquid to remove any solids and let the chocolate mixture cool.
4. Place in the fridge for 4 hours or overnight.
5. Churn mixture in your ice cream maker as directed.
It was a very easy recipe and it reminded me how easy my ice cream maker is and how easy it would be for me to make healthier versions of sorbet for my dairy allergy daughter. It tasted exactly like the ice cream from Missoula...but the texture was all wrong. It wasn't creamy really at all...more "icy" than "creamy". I am considering this particular item on the list checked off, because I did it but my journey to replicate this ice cream is not complete.
Joe had tasted the Mexican chocolate I used when I was chopping it and he said that the texture of the ice cream was pretty much the same as the chocolate...kind of gritty and icy. My plan is to look for a well reviewed chocolate ice cream recipe and kick it up with adding cinnamon. It is not something I want to keep on hand all the time, so is probably not something I am going try again really soon but it will happen again. Maybe for my birthday in September....
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