Thursday, February 21, 2013

Jeni's Salted Caramel Ice Cream: Meh

Hmm... while this ice cream looks kinda awesome, it was unfortunately, meh.  The recipe receives the thumbs up from neither Tim nor I.


I have successfully made salted butter caramel ice cream before and loved the recipe (from my fav, David Lebovitz), and yet I found myself tempted to try this recipe for salted caramel ice cream that I stumbled upon on The Bitten Word.  The methodology differs from the Lebovitz way in that it does not acquire its thickness from an eggy custard, but from an intriguing combination of cream cheese, corn starch and corn syrup.  Plus the internet is full of raves about Jeni's ice cream, a popular ice cream shop in Ohio and Tennessee.


It wasn't very hard to pull together, but we just plain did not like the results.  Too bitter (maybe I prefer the larger amount of sugar called for in the Lebovitz recipe?), too weirdly cheesecakey from the cream cheese (it's hard to believe that "cheesecakey" could be a bad thing, but here it is), strangely sour (maybe from boiling the milk?).  Sad...

We tried to jazz it up with some caramel sauce (Simply Recipes' version), but to no avail.  Oh well... live, learn, stick to the tried-and-true basics when it comes to ice cream.