Sara (kitchen) here. Ok, we haven’t started offering ice cream at the restaurants but there IS a way to get ice cream from Clover in your own kitchen. If you head to the Meal Box area of our app before Thursday at 5pm, you can order a No-Churn Corn Ice Cream Kit.
I’ve never had too much of a sweet tooth, but I’ve always had a soft spot for ice cream. I’ve been making a lot of it at home this summer, and I always bring some in for the Clover team. When we were thinking about a Verrill Farm Corn Meal Box, I couldn’t stop thinking about corn ice cream.
The churnable ice cream I make at home is your classic creme anglaise base (a custard made by tempering egg yolks into a mixture of hot milk and sugar). The egg yolks, which are high in fat and protein, lend a lot of richness to the ice cream base and create a really silky texture as air is incorporated during the churning process.
For our box we’d need to make something we could send to you non-frozen and ideally something you wouldn’t need a special piece of equipment to pull off.
In my research I found that people often fold whipped cream into sweetened condensed milk to achieve a similar texture to a churned custard-based ice cream. So I tried combining 2 parts heavy cream with 1 part sugar and cooking it down until it reduced by about half. I added corn kernels AND corn cobs (and a pinch of salt to enhance the corn flavor!) because it takes about an hour to simmer it low and slow until thickened. That hour-long-process gives the corn plenty of time to infuse.
For the whipped cream portion of the base, it was really important to me not to dilute the corn flavor by cutting it with something too sweet/plain. So I decided to make corn whipped cream! I pulverized some of our freeze dried corn (you might remember it from the Nashville Hot Mushroom sandwich) and folded that into a homemade whipped cream. The corn dust lends a really nice yellow color and lets the sweet corn flavor shine through nicely.
From there, I let the corn-infused sweetened condensed milk fully cool, folded it into the corn whipped cream, stuck it in the freezer for a few hours and wow – we were able to scoop it, just like ice cream.
If you get this box you’ll be getting pre-frozen ice cream mixture – just pop it in the freezer for at least 4 hours, along with fresh corn, a deep soy sauce caramel (I love sweet + salty stuff), and popcorn kernels.
I actually really enjoy the texture before it’s frozen, as well. I’m secretly hoping that someone at home gets creative and makes a no bake cheesecake with it or enjoys it as a corn mousse.
