Claire Saffitz Makes Matcha Ice Cream | Dessert Person

Hi everyone, I'm Claire Saffitz. Welcome to my home kitchen. Today, I'm showing you a recipe for matcha ice cream. It's so, so delicious. Matcha is an amazing tool for baking because it has bitterness and grassiness and earthiness, and it's an amazing counterpoint to dairy and sugar. So this is a really straightforward recipe. I'm gonna show you how to make a basic ice cream base. We're gonna add some matcha to it, spin it in the ice cream machine. It's gonna be pretty quick. What I'm really doing is making a vanilla ice cream base, and we're adding matcha to it. And another reason matcha is amazing for ice cream is because you can add all the flavor, but you add no liquid. And that's really key for ice cream because the amount of fat and liquid, like in milk and cream, is really important to the overall texture of the ice cream. So when you can add flavor without adding liquid, that's always ideal. So ingredients, super straightforward. I'm making a custard-style ice cream base. I have milk and heavy cream. In my ice cream bases, I always do two-to-one cream to milk. I have egg yolks here, five large egg yolks. I have a tablespoon of powdered milk. It's kind of optional, but it does help to enhance texture. A little bit of kosher salt, three tablespoons of matcha, 3 1⁄4 of a cup of sugar, and some vanilla paste. We're doing basically a vanilla base with matcha. Special equipment, I'm using a saucepan. I like to temp my custard just to make sure. I know the eggs are fully cooked, so I have an instant-read thermometer, a little strainer for the custard, and then, of course, you'll need an ice cream machine. This is not a no-churn ice cream. You will be churning. So the first step, I have my saucepan here. So I'm gonna get this on low, basically medium-low. I'm gonna start with our milk, our heavy cream. And this recipe makes about a quart of base. And that's generally how much you can fit into any home ice cream machine at any time. If you have vanilla beans at home, this would be a great use for it. I have beans, but I just love the ease of a little vanilla paste. So I'm gonna do two teaspoons of paste. If you're using vanilla bean, go ahead, use a half. Scrape it, split it, scrape it. Add the seeds and the pod to your dairy. We're also going to add, of our 3⁄4 of a cup of sugar, we're gonna add half a cup, so 2⁄3 of the total. And this you can eyeball, because it's all gonna get mixed back together anyway. And we're gonna let that dissolve. Then I'm gonna add my salt, so that can dissolve, and my powdered milk, so that can dissolve. All right, so we're gonna let all of that come to just below a simmer. Like, you want just sort of steaming and a little bubbling around the edges. So we're gonna cook this until the eggs are fully cooked and set, and it's gonna thicken it. So whenever we cook a custard, we always start with our, well, almost always, we start with our hot dairy. So this is warming up. Then we're gonna take our remaining sugar, our matcha, again, three tablespoons. This is for more of like a moderate matcha flavor. If you want it like super grassy with a little bitterness, you can do four tablespoons. And now I'm gonna add my five yolks. And we're going to whisk all of this together. By adding the matcha at this step, you do a couple of things. You're working out any lumps, because it's like a super, super fine powder. And it means we're also gonna cook the matcha into the base, which will help to like bloom the flavor and bring out the flavor of the matcha. So while my dairy is warming up, we're gonna whisk this until it's a little bit ribbony. So it's gonna get kind of thick and glossy and a little bit aerated, like a little bit light and a little pale. So this mixture is steaming. I don't know if you can see the steam coming off of it. I'm gonna take this off the heat. So now we're gonna mix them together. The part where you mix together the eggs and the sugar, that's called tempering. This is where we're going to slowly raise the temperature of the egg mixture by slowly adding and whisking in your dairy. You're better off doing this on a kitchen towel. And so the idea is that we don't wanna add the eggs directly to the hot dairy because you could cook them. So this tempering step brings up, raises the egg temp. So you can whisk in most of the dairy mixture, leave a little bit in the saucepan. And now all of this gets whisked back into the saucepan. One of the reasons why we warm up the dairy, it's partly to infuse it with flavor. Like if you're adding vanilla or you can like steep coffee beans in it, that's a way to infuse the flavor. But it's also to start with a mixture that's already hot so that you're not sitting and stirring for like a very, very long time to get to the point that the eggs are cooked. So we're gonna put this back over the heat on like a medium and we are going to whisk this constantly until we get to a temperature of 180. That's the point at which those yolks are gonna be cooked and the mixture is gonna thicken. One way I know I'm there without actually having to even temp it is it's kind of holding the marks of the whisk. Like I can see the whisk leave a little trail. That's a sign of the thickening. And also when we were whisking the eggs, there was a foam that I developed and that foam has kind of like reabsorbed into the mixture. So let me see what the temp is. Oh, oh yeah. Oh, I'm there. So this is cooked. You can see how fast that was. So if I were to have started with from, you can like mix sugar and eggs and dairy cold and cook them up and bring them to temp. It just takes a lot longer. So starting with an already hot mixture means we get to that point much faster. So once I knew I was there, the eggs were cooked, I took it off the heat. The heat is off. So now we're just, we wanna strain this. So I have this little, a very fine strainer. And that's because we wanna catch any little bits of egg that like maybe overcooked or just didn't get incorporated, any lumps of matcha, stuff like that. Cause we want a super smooth ice cream. So we're gonna strain. This is much easier to strain while it's hot. So that's probably why we're doing that at this stage. There's definitely some matcha little bits that I'm able to strain out. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and finish straining this. And once it's strained, this needs to chill. So it's really best if you leave it overnight, but like at least four hours. And that's so that the custard has a chance for it to just, everything should get cold. And that's because we wanna start with a cold base when we go to spin the ice cream. So I actually have one that I made last night and it's ready to go. And we're gonna go right into spinning our ice cream. I'm happy to have an excuse to get out my ice cream maker. So here's my base that was set up last night. So I'm gonna pour this in. All right, then the lid goes on. Hold on, I have my vanilla seeds at the bottom. I wanna just scrape those in. Then cover it. It takes about anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the base and how much you have in there. So I'll come back and check on it. And we're not quite done because then it really has to kind of freeze and set up in the freezer for a little while. But this will be into ice cream very soon. I'm gonna turn the machine off. Generally, I know the ice cream is done when it has like a little bit of a stretch to it. Obviously, it's like gotten thick, starting to pull away from the sides. It's done spinning, but it does need to freeze solid. So you know what I should have done is like pre-frozen this in the freezer, but I forgot. So we're gonna just scoop the spun ice cream. See that stretch? I love that. We're gonna scoop this into our loaf pan, cover it. And this just is gonna freeze solid in the freezer for a little bit before we can scoop it and taste it. Really, it should take a few hours for the ice cream to set up in the freezer. But it's the middle of the night here and everyone wants to go to bed. It's only been an hour. It's a little soft, but we're gonna scoop it and taste it. Ooh, it is like such a nice consistency. Oh my gosh. Actually, it's kind of like the perfect texture. It looks so delicious. So I'm gonna try it. The like bitterness plus creaminess is really satisfying. I think that the matcha flavor actually comes through more now that it's like had a chance to sit and it's really good. I feel like it's kind of an overlooked ice cream and it's not always one of the standard flavors. You see anything like matcha that's like has bitterness and earthiness, such a great flavor for ice cream because like the blank canvas of the dairy and vanilla is just perfect. Really good, pretty. It's just like actually so much easier to make ice cream at home than I even think. And really, truly the hardest part is like getting on your ice cream maker. That's the most annoying part. Everything else is great. And if you have a bunch of egg yolks, perfect use for it. And like matcha is delicious all year round. And I'm actually really excited that I have this one plus another base in my fridge, which I'm gonna spin. And we're gonna have more matcha ice cream. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe. See you next time.