Fall Flavor of the Week: Campfire

   It's a pleasant 58 degrees, stars dust the velvety sky, and the swollen moon looks like a rich scoop of marshmallow ice cream. The fire crackles and spits friendly flares into the air that fade into nothingness as they fall back down. Your dad is snoring, wrapped and half-wrapped in a sweater and a sleeping bag; you are the only one still awake, and you listen to the sounds of nature around you. The warmth of the fire beckons you closer, but you know better than to crouch to close. Beside you a pile of thin sticks lay with gooey tips, the satisfaction of roasted 'mallow, melty chocolate, and crunchy graham still lingers in your belly.

  Take this and freeze it.

  This is what I was trying to capture when I thought of this ice cream. Sure, S'mores ice cream has been done before. But not this way. I've had several, and with each one I was left in want, left without that real fireside feeling. Commercialized ice cream, like Ben&Jerry's S'mores, only aims to capture the general taste of what the real treat tastes like.

   I had a different goal in mind.

Campfire - roasted marshmallow ice cream swirled with dark chocolate ice cream, layered with graham cracker

(this is a photo of my chocolate ice cream, though with peanut butter, just to give you an idea of its deep, silkiness.)

   My goal was, yes, to capture the true taste, but to also capture a feeling, a memory, an experience, an emotion that no store-bought ice cream ever can. In fact, I can't stand commercialized chocolate ice cream. Try out Ben&Jerry's S'mores and you'll see what I mean. It's not rich, it's too sweet, it's not dense, and it tastes cheap. I use Dutch processed dark cocoa and a blend of 65% specialty chocolate to create a truly rich, deep, full-bodied chocolate ice cream that has layers of flavor. (For my darkest chocolate ice cream, I use 85% chocolate; but I wanted to slide a bit closer toward the milk chocolate used in real s'mores).
   If you let my chocolate set in your mouth and move it around a bit until it melts, you'll find those layers. It is deeper than any chocolate ice cream I have ever had. It's chalky and bitter, but is balanced with sweetness and milkiness. After molding in the freezer for several hours, it still scoops like butter. It tastes like the inside of a truffle. Melts in your mouth, literally.

   The thing that actually sets this flavor apart from any of the s'mores aspirers is my Roasted Marshmallow ice cream. I don't use the word "roasted" lightly. It is a trendy thing to have "toasted marshmallow" items. I toast coconut. But I burn my marshmallows.
   I like my s'mores to have that charred, black marshmallow as its gooey backbone, not some lightly browned sugar puff that won't melt my chocolate. So, I put the marshmallows in the oven, cranked up the broiler, and let the sugars darken. It was a caramelization process. I then packed them into a blender, and added the hot milk-cream-egg mixture to it, and blended it all together. The liquid turned a dark brown color from the disintegrated blackened sugar flakes. I tested it...campfire.
   Once frozen, the true taste of the ice cream doesn't hit immediately. It's a delayed gratification. Although a hint of marshmallow does appear first, you have to let it sit and then revel in the aftertaste to really taste that roasted marshmallow. It's smokey and sweet. I combo that I am falling in love with. So, when you hear or see "toasted marshmallow" on an ice cream or dessert menu, you know that the people are too afraid to burn a few things to get at real genius. Don't be afraid to burn.

   The pints are my template to which I can craft the ice cream in any form and style I want. I wanted to recreate an actual s'more, so I thought out my layering process sufficiently: graham cracker, chocolate ice cream, roasted marshmallow ice cream, graham cracker, etc, until the pint lid sealed out the air.
   I had raving reviews about the graham cracker. Bready things do wonders to ice creams. They are like little patches of dry land that cause the mind to trip and stumble, forcing the mind to go back and really think about why that happened; and therefore causing an extreme taste invasion onto the palate, which evokes an elating response from the sensory receptors in the mind. (push up glasses)
   I believe in this counter-balancing technique. It is an attention to detail that I highly hone in on. It isn't something that I just throw together to see what happens. The graham cracker was chunky, gritty, and offered a cookie-like taste to balance out the creaminess of the other two flavors. It worked.

It was frozen s'mores.

It was frozen childhood.

-Reese O'Shirey, Esquire