House-hunting in Rome & Inspiration from the interwebs – May edition

House-hunting – the bane of my existence. While the past 12 odd years of moving across Europe (Germany-Austria and back, Germany-UK and back (a few times), UK-Brussels and back and, lastly, UK-Italy) have taught me a great deal about minimising the stuff we all drag around with us (well, except for my cookbook collection, but I am not willing to part with that) and to wrap my beautiful bowls I bought when we went to Japan carefully enough to survive a move half-way around Europe, the one thing I am still utterly crap at is house-hunting itself. I know what websites to use, what sleazy property agents to avoid, what questions to ask prospective landlords, what hidden costs to look for etc, but at the end of the day I struggle with the simple fact that, at least if you are renting in large cities, you will never find a place that ticks all your boxes. Now add a boyfriend to the equation and that list of boxes (and non-negotiables!) just got longer.

So for the past month and a half the two of us have been scouring craigstlist, picking up the local small ads newspaper, discussing our non-negotiables (mine is, no surprise, an oven and a stove with 4 hobs – surprisingly hard to come by in central Rome if you have a somewhat limited budget – his? Storage space big enough to put all our suitcases, skiing gear etc. in), viewing flats during our lunch breaks and after work, spending Saturday mornings getting up early for further viewings and generally trying to avoid wasting our time by trying to decipher all the ‘bullshit’ (excuse my French) prospective landlords tell prospective tenants (never in my life has the word ‘light-flooded’ been so ill-placed as when used to describe the myriad of dingy and dark flats I have seen over the past few weeks).

Alas we have finally found a place in our favourite neighbourhood in Rome, Monti (see the various pictures in the post to get an idea of what Monti looks like) – although I am keeping my fingers crossed until the contract is signed, we have received a set of keys and said keys fit the lock of our flat.  I am itching to get back into the kitchen (which is spacious!) as my brain is in overdrive with coming up with ideas for what to cook/bake next!

Now that our move date is near (eek, only 2 more weeks!) and most of our life has already been packed into boxes, dinners have been straightforward to say the least – I was actually proud the other day at having whipped up something akin to a real dish in the form of a summery salad of watermelon, sliced peaches, some crumbs of Ricotta Salata (a cheese similar to Feta but milkier and with a less creamy texture) and dressed with some olive oil, torn parsley, chili and some Maldon sea salt flakes - some nights dinner was pretty much a bowl of yoghurt with a banana.  At least it is only a few more weeks until we can get settled into our new place and I can get my hands dirty again in a kitchen. Until then, I will daydream about these dishes:

 

1. These olive oil pastry tarts with a chocolate avocado filling.  I love Laura’s blog with all my heart – every single post is photographed so beautifully and I have yet to come across anything she has made I did not want to immediately devour.  The olive oil pastry shell is totally intriguing to me – while I bake a lot with olive oil I have yet to make pastry with it.  And the avocado chocolate filling? Yes, please! I tried something similar the other day using avocado, Valrhona cocoa powder, Maldon sea salt and maple syrup to make a mousse and it was divine – incredibly rich and chocolatey and I can see how something similar would work well oh so well as a tart filling. 

2. The Minimalist Baker’s Horchata recipe reminded me that it’s time to whip out my food processor again, make some Horchata, some ice cubes and sit back slowly sipping a glass of refreshing cinnamon-spiced Horchata … or indeed pouring it over a glass of iced coldbrew coffee (a trick I learned from the Spanish deli around the corner from my old office).   And while we are on the subject of home-made nut or cereal milk – head over to Shanna’s blog for a lesson on making your own almond milk.  Oh and if you decide to make your own Horchata, may I recommend blasting this song while you do so?

3. It’s early in the season but the first peaches are starting to appear.  While I know I am particularly partial to fennel at least I can blame Gelupo for coming up with the genius idea of pairing peaches and fennel.  If I get any say in this, there will definitely be some more peach tarts filled with fennel-infused pastry cream this summer.

4. Until a summer spent by the beach in southern Italy it never occurred to me that watermelons actually grow in Italy but now that I know that I can justify my addiction (how else can you explain the fact I once ate a 20lb watermelon by myself in less than 48 hours) in wanting to eat locally and reduce my carbon footprint – expect versions of this salad to pop up on my instagram over the summer.

5. And just as I was reading about (and, quite honestly, trying to work out what it would taste like) vanilla-scented tomato jam, I came across a recipe for goat’s cheese panna cotta served with candied tomatoes.  And however much I try to imagine what this tastes like, my brain and taste buds won’t compute the sweetness of the dish with the slight acidity of the tomatoes and the savoury goat’s cheese.  I guess I have to make this to know more!

Chickpea and Fennel ‘Risotto’

As is clear from a quick glance at my recipe index, I have a pretty big sweet tooth.  So much so that I rarely feature savoury recipes on my blog. The truth is, baking for me is relaxation and with a busy job and a fair amount of travel, dinner, while often delicious, typically involves me and Alessandro staring into our empty fridge and trying to come up with something decent to eat. I love cooking big meals for friends, but the occasions where we all manage to get together around our big dining table are few and far between.

The other day, save for a bulb of fennel, some onions and garlic, our fridge and vegetable basket were empty challenging me to come up with something edible based on the little food we had to hand! A quick glance in the pantry and I found what would be the star of our meal – a jar of chickpeas! While Alessandro has converted me to using dried pulses whenever possible, the truth is I am rarely organised enough to soak any at the right moment and most days I definitely lack the patience to wait 1 hour or more for my dinner to be ready. 

I also found an open bottle of dry white wine, and decided this was the perfect accompaniment to my dinner and quickly settled on making a ‘risotto’ of sorts.  As you will see from the list of ingredients below, this dish is not an actual risotto in that it is made without any rice.  You see, moving to Italy is great and I have been indulging in my fair share of pasta, pizza and risotto, fresh sourdough bread, grissini – you name the carbohydrate, I will have eaten it at some point in the past 6 months.  But, somehow I am done with all these carbohydrates for now at least and I have been craving pulses and fresh vegetables.  Also, the warmer temperatures Rome has been experiencing the last couple of weeks has reminded me that summer is around the corner and maybe it is time to lay off at least some of the heavier food Alessandro and I have been enjoying over the cold winter in time for weekends by the beach.

Chickpeas (also called garbanzo beans) are, like most pulses, full of starch, and thus lend themselves perfectly to the slow cooking typical of making risotto.  Following the same method as for a traditional risotto (adding vegetable stock ladle by ladle with continuous stirring between each addition) produces a gorgeously creamy and thick dish, similar to a hearty winter stew or thick soup.  Nonetheless, I called it a ‘risotto’ due to the cooking technique and the flavour of the dish.

I should also say that things might be a little quieter around here in the next few weeks – Alessandro and I are flat-hunting and packing up our current apartment so I will likely have less time to spend in the kitchen (probably a good thing given that it is basically hot enough to head to the beach, yet also cruel given that summer fruits have started appearing at the market).  I will try and pop in every once in a while though to say hi and hope to be back to more regular posting sometime in June.

Chickpea and Fennel ‘Risotto’, serves 2

Ingredients

240g chickpeas, cooked (or the drained contents of 1 can of chickpeas)

1/2 medium-sized fennel bulb, thinly sliced

1 small onion, thinly sliced

1 clove of garlic

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1/2 glass dry white wine

0.75 liters vegetable stock*

1/2 bunch of parsley, chopped

60g parmesan cheese, grated (you could use other hard cheese, like pecorino, as well)

2 tablespoons olive oil (plus extra for garnish)

*Ale has converted me to making my own vegetable stock (usually a mix of carrots, celery and onion, browned in a bit of olive oil and then slowly simmered in a pot of water, seasoned with salt and pepper) but, in a pinch, you could use ready-made stock or stock cubes.

Directions

1. Start by frying the sliced fennel, onion, garlic and fennel seeds in the olive oil on medium heat until the fennel and onion are translucent. Be careful not to brown the onion and the garlic as they will taste bitter otherwise. Add the chickpeas.

2.  While the fennel, onion, garlic and fennel seeds are cooking, gently heat up the vegetable stock and keep it on a low flame.

3. Pour the white wine over the fennel, onion, garlic, fennel seeds and chickpeas and stir until the wine has evaporated.

4. Add the vegetable stock one ladle at a time, waiting for the stock to be almost fully absorbed before adding the next ladle, stirring continuously between each addition.

5.  Once the chickpeas are soft and have started breaking down (ca. 15-20 minutes), the ‘risotto’ is ready. Add enough stock so that the chickpeas are barely covered. (Note, you may not need the full 0.75l of stock).  Remove the garlic clove. Add salt and pepper to taste.

6.  Distribute the ‘risotto’ between two deep plates, garnish with the chopped parsley, a drizzle of olive oil and grated parmesan cheese.

Orange Mocha Marble Cake

While I am researching different eclairs recipes and different methods and ingredients for making pastry cream for a new recipe (which I am already very excited about sharing), I baked an Orange Mocha Marble Cake the other day to have on hand for easy breakfasts at home and to nibble on during the day.

But before we talk about the Orange Mocha Marble Cake, I wanted to say that I was super excited to hear that my recipe for Toasted Rice Blancmanger was featured in the Guardian’s Cook section under the theme ‘WOBBLY’ last weekend! I absolutely love creating recipes and it is even better when others like my creations!

Back to this marble cake – chocolate and orange is one of my favourite flavour combinations but the addition of coffee was new to me until very recently. I first came across this in the form of a Chocolate Orange Tiramisu at Jamie’s Italian which opened fairly recently in my old neighbourhood in Angel, London – in fact, a colleague sent me there purely to try their Orange Tiramisu and I am glad he did! Coffee, chocolate and orange is like a grown-up, dialled-up version of chocolate and orange. I already prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate when paired with orange as it’s less sickly sweet. And what can I say, coffee takes this flavour combination to another level, with a similar contrast between the bitter coffee and the sweet and fresh orange to pairing orange with chocolate.

In my family we typically had a Marble Cake for my brother’s birthday – being born in February meant a fresh fruit cake was out of the question (as my parents have always refused to buy out of season fruit and vegetables) – and I have always loved the contrast between the lighter part of the cake and the dark chocolatey part. Also, as a child I found the spirals in the cake utterly fascinating. This time though I was looking for a slightly more interesting flavour combination and when I spotted a lone orange in our fruit bowl the other day settling on an Orange Mocha Marble Cake was an easy decision given that I had been looking for the perfect occasion to bake something using this favour combination.

I used the zest of 1 whole orange to flavour the light part of the cake – while this might seem a lot for half of a fairly small loaf cake, it will seem just right when the cake comes out of the oven. The flavour of the chocolate and coffee is pretty strong so you need a fair amount of orange zest to stand up against that! I ended up adding the coffee flavour in the form of an espresso shot rather than simply using espresso powder because I wanted to prevent the dark part of the cake from becoming too dry as a result of the additional cocoa powder.

Orange Mocha Marble Cake
Very loosely adapted from Das Teubner Handbuch zum Backen

Ingredients, makes 1 loaf cake
2 eggs
125ml olive oil
125g muscovado sugar
Pinch of salt
200g wholemeal flour
50g cornstarch
1.5 teaspoons baking powder
30g cocoa powder
100ml milk
20ml strong espresso (1 shot)
Zest of 1 orange

Directions

1. Pre-heat the oven to 175 degrees and grease a loaf pan.

2. Beat the eggs with an electric mixer on high speed, slowly drizzling in the olive oil.

3. Once the olive oil has all been incorporated, add the sugar, beating until the mixture is no longer gritty.

4. In a separate bowl whisk together the flour, cornstarch, salt and baking powder.

5. Add half of the flour mixture to the egg mix and whisk to combine. Stir in half the milk, followed by the remainder of the flour mixture and then the remaining milk. Divide the batter between two bowls.

6. To one bowl add the orange zest and stir to combine.

7. Add the cocoa powder and the coffee to the second bowl and stir to combine.

8. Add the orange-flavoured batter to the loaf pan, followed by the mocha-flavoured batter. Using a fork draw a few spirals in the batter, lifting the fork as you go (this will create a marbled effect in the loaf once baked).

9. Place in the oven and bake for ca. 60 minutes or until a wooden skewer inserted into the middle of the loaf comes out clean.

Note: if you want to substitute plain flour for the wholemeal flour, I would recommend reducing the amount of milk to 50ml and the espresso to 10ml as plain flour absorbs less liquid than wholemeal flour.

Baked Wholemeal Blueberry Donuts

Like most of us, Alessandro loves donuts (and admittedly I am rather partial to them as well – in fact, when I was exercising a hell of a lot in university I would sometimes treat myself to one of those gigantic donuts covered in thick icing for breakfast. Not something I would want to tell my dentist or nutritionist about but dang did I enjoy those donuts!). While I like trying to recreate sweet treats at home (in an attempt to make them somewhat healthier if possible and exclude those scary E-numbers), I have always shied away from making my own donuts because of the deep-frying involved (probably a smart choice given I am clumsy enough to have burned myself with porridge and fallen off a treadmill). But then I started seeing more and more recipes for baked donuts and I started thinking that maybe the way to donut success at home was to bake them.

But, some of the recipes I came across produced donuts that looked either very cakey or, in the case of recipes based on light enriched yeasted doughs, dry, neither of which I find appealing for a donut. It was when I was baking financiers that it occurred to me that the texture I was after might be easiest to achieve with a typical financier batter – a simple light batter containing no more than egg whites, sugar, flour and butter.

I did my first trial run this weekend by making some baked wholemeal blueberry donuts and they were so good that Alessandro and I finished the entire batch of 8 donuts between the two of us for breakfast. Admittedly they were very small (only about 5cm in diameter), but still, a donut is a donut.

The taste was wonderful – rich and flavourful from the butter and the muscovado sugar but not too sweet at all (I had cut down the original amount of sugar given the extra sugar-coating on the outside), there was a nice crunch from the sugar-coating sticking to the donuts thanks to a thin wash of melted butter all over the still warm donuts and the fresh blueberries which had cooked down into little jam-like puddles provided a nice little sharp contrast. But the real success was the texture – the donuts were perfectly light and airy while also deliciously moist.

These baked donuts are perfect fresh out of the oven and are so easy and quick to whip up they would be perfect to whip up for last-minute brunch guests.

Baked Wholemeal Blueberry Donuts

Ingredients, makes 8 mini donuts or 4 regular size donuts

2 egg whites
40g muscovado sugar
pinch of salt
50g wholemeal flour
60g butter, melted
80g fresh blueberries
10g butter, melted
extra sugar for coating (ca. 4-5 tablespoons)

Directions

1. Pre-heat your oven to 175 degrees Celsius.

2. Whisk the egg whites together with the muscovado sugar and the pinch of salt until stiff and glossy.

3. Add the flour, melted butter and blueberries to the bowl containing the beaten egg whites and carefully fold the flour, butter and berries into the egg white mixture being careful not to deflate it.

4. Fill a pastry bag with batter and carefully pipe into your donut mould. Smooth the top of each mould with the back of a wet spoon (to stop the batter of sticking to the spoon).

5. Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes or until the tops of the donuts are golden-brown in colour and a toothpick inserted into the middle of the donuts comes out clean.

6. Let donuts cool in the mould for a couple of minutes and then carefully invert them onto a serving plate.

7. Lastly, brush each donut all around with some of the extra melted butter and then carefully coat them with the extra sugar.

Note: I baked these in a silicone baba mould (I figured I could not justify buying a mould just to make donuts, so thought I might get more use out of a baba mould) and would definitely recommend using a silicone mould here as it makes it so much easier to remove the rather fragile donuts while they are still warm so you can brush them with butter and coat them with sugar. If you use a metal mould, make sure to grease it really well and you might want to wait 5-10 minutes before removing the donuts from the mould after baking.

Some more inspiration from the interwebs – April edition

I have been busy book-marking new blogs and mouth-watering recipes so rather than let all of these links collect ‘dust’ in my email archives, similar to my last inspiration post I thought I would share with you what I have been day-dreaming about and playing in my kitchen without blogging about it lately:

1. I have had this NY Times recipe for David Chang’s Bo Ssam (i.e. Korean pulled pork) saved since before I moved to Rome – in fact I loved the sound of this so much, I emailed it to friends and family at the time. Last weekend I told Alessandro it was time, time to buy a hunk of pork, head to the Korean supermarket (conveniently close to our house) to stock up on hard to track down Korean ingredients and invite some hungry friends over to demolish that hunk of pork. Trying to convince a bunch of Italians to come over for a Korean dinner was as tricky as I expected (“but I don’t like spicy!” / “I don’t like sweet and sour!” / “I don’t eat ginger!”) but with the promise of buying pizza in case people didn’t like it we found ourselves with a table full of hungry eaters willing to at least try the Bo Ssam. What is it? A piece of slow-roasted pork (dry-brined in sugar and salt overnight) served with plain rice, Kimchi, ginger-scallion sauce and a spicy chili sauce. You eat it in the form of lettuce wraps – start with some plain rice, some pork and top it with any or all of the sauces/dips – a complete mess to eat but absolutely delicious. Oh and me and the Italians? We demolished the hunk of pork in 20 minutes flat and the table was silent the entire time other than a few grunts of “pass me the pork” / “who has the spicy sauce?” / “is there any kimchi left?”.

2. Rhubarb season is here – I already emailed my dad this link to 15 recipes using rhubarb I came across on the Saveur website. I have yet to come across rhubarb in Rome (maybe I need to make a trip to the farmers’ market this weekend) but I like the idea of a rhubarb upside down cake served with some whipped Mascarpone or Ricotta.

3. Ever since buying Ginette Matthiot’s book on French baking, I have started bookmarking more and more French recipes. I still want to bake a twist on a classic Paris Brest (Choux Pastry filled with a rich cream made with hazelnut praline) but am waiting for the right occasion given filled Choux Pastry is best eaten when freshly made. While I wait, I am tempted to get my hands sticky and floury (and my lips covered in brown butter and sugar) by baking a Kouign Amann – a French yeasted cake with layer upon layer of butter and sugar. There are few recipes for this online, but thankfully David Leibovitz has posted a recipe with some really detailed instructions (and, from the looks of it, it cannot be harder to make than a Galette des Rois!).

4. Also, next time I get some wisdowm tooth pain, I know what I am having for dinner: this Olive Oil Custard (the recipes calls for some Meyer lemons which sadly are not available in Italy, I used oranges instead and it was wonderful). I made this custard the last time I had wisdom tooth pain and as soon as I licked the velvety custard of my spoon the pain was all but forgotten. The olive oil taste is not just a background note here but quite pronounced, yet I found that the grassy flavour of the oil together with the orange zest and acidity from the orange juice worked so so well.

5. I have been meaning to bake some cookies or biscuits that will keep well and that we can have on hand to serve when friends stop by for coffee (which many of them invariably do on Saturdays and Sundays given how close we live to Rome’s Monti neighbourhood and given that you can almost always find parking right by our house, a rarity in central Rome) – I bookmarked this recipe for some crisp and very thin almond cookies a while ago. Now I just need to find the time to bake them!

Let me know if you give any of these recipes a try!

And now you will have to excuse me, but that view below is waiting for me – time for my weekly long run in the vain hope of undoing some of the carbohydrate overload I am finding so hard to resist here …

Buckwheat Olive Oil Cacao Nib Financiers

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with some random thought that keeps me from falling asleep again until I have made a note of that thought. Useful when these are important things like finally thinking of a present for a particularly hard to please birthday girl or boy, emailing a client about something I had not thought of before but now seems really important, but quite often it’s pretty random things like reminding myself to do another load of laundry in time for everything to dry for an impending trip. The other night I had one of those rather trivial thoughts that kept me up a while – figuring out what flavour financiers to make with the egg whites left over from the Olive Oil Gelato I made.

I woke up to a draft email on my blackberry that simply read “Buckwheat Olive Oil Cacao Nib” and rather than force myself through a morning workout when I was sore and stiff from overdoing it in the gym the day before I quickly set to work in the kitchen. I adapted the original recipe I had come across quite a bit, using buckwheat flour instead of plain wheat flour, reducing the amount of sugar by about a fifth and using muscovado sugar instead of white caster sugar because I think it works really well with heartier and nuttier flours like buckwheat, subbing half the butter for olive oil (I did not use olive oil alone as I did not want the taste to be overpowering given the short ingredient list) and last but not least, I added a little handful of cacao nibs.

Cacao nibs are basically the fragments of crushed cacao beans (once they have been dried and fermented), used in the production of cacao paste (also called chocolate liquor), a key ingredient in the chocolate bars most of us wolf down to get past that mid-afternoon slump at work. Cacao nibs are crunchy, similar to toasted nuts, and have an intense chocolatey taste not unlike very dark chocolate, which is why I like to call them chocolate chips for grown-ups.  I love adding them to quick breads like this Orange Chocolate loaf, cookies (or even on top of ice cream) – they are wonderfully crunchy when raw yet become softer and with an even more intense chocolate taste once baked. Buckwheat goes really well with cacao nibs and here the nibs give a little bit of bite to these otherwise very soft and spongey little cakes. If you don’t have any cacao nibs, feel free to use chocolate chips or chopped nuts (I think walnuts would go particularly well with these).

Buckwheat Olive Oil and Cacao Nib Financiers

Ingredients

4 egg whites
100g muscovado sugar
Pinch of salt
125g buckwheat flour
60g butter, melted
60g olive oil
40g cacao nibs

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius.

2. Whisk the egg whites together with the sugar and pinch of salt until thick and glossy (with a handheld mixer this will take about 3-4 minutes).

3. Pour the melted butter and olive oil over the eggs. Combine the buckwheat flour with the cacao nibs and add to the eggs as well.

4. Carefully fold the flour, cacao nib, butter and olive oil into the egg whites, being careful not to deflate the mixture.

5. Carefully spoon the mixture into a financier mould (I used a silicone one so there was no need to grease and flour it, but if you are not using a silicone mould, grease the mould carefully with some butter and lightly dust with flour), filling about 2/3 of each mould and smooth the tops with a spatula.

6. Place in the oven for ca. 20 minutes until the financiers are light golden in colour and a toothpick inserted into the middle of the financiers comes out clean. Let cool in the moulds for 5 minutes before inverting onto a cooling rack.

While these are best eaten on the day they are made, they will keep for a 3-4 days if wrapped well or kept in a plastic container somewhere cool.

Olive oil gelato

While living in the centre of Rome has plenty of advantages (my walk to work takes me down the Spanish steps and my weekend long runs are are built on an ever increasing number of laps around the Circo Massimo), there are plenty of downsides too. Parking is a nightmare – if I leave the house too late both weekend runs and my morning walk to work are made all the more difficult by having to zigzag around the hordes of tourists descending on Rome in increasing numbers now that the temperatures are rising. But my main gripe is really our minuscule kitchen, in particular our freezer compartment that is about the size of a shoebox. While I know from friends who have lived in Paris that most inner-city flats there don’t have fully stocked kitchens (the assumption being that most people won’t cook), I somehow did not think this would apply to other cities. Yet here I am with a freezer that just about fits a single tray of icecubes, a bag of frozen porcini mushrooms, some frozen herbs and is only just about tall enough to fit the double-walled bowl of my icecream maker.

Back in London me and my flatmates had a pretty big fridge and a freezer with 4 or 5 drawers – perfect for always having some of my mum’s sourdough bread on hand, frozen berries for smoothies, frozen bananas for banana soft serve, leftovers for easy dinners and the odd pint of icecream. No such luck in Rome. In fact, it’s taking me this long to get round to making icecream in Rome as there was simply no room in our freezer to store it. But, this weekend there was finally a big enough gap in the freezer to freeze the bowl of my icecream maker and to fit in the ready icecream.

I have mentioned this before, but thanks to easy access to extra virgin olive oil through friends and family of Alessandro, and a wish to make decadent desserts just a tad healthier, olive oil has appeared as an ingredient in more and more of what I whip up in our tiny kitchen – whether it is a chocolate olive oil pate a tartiner (perfect spread on a toasted slice of this brioche methinks), brownies, or in a ganache drizzled over these mini mocha bundt cakes or indeed, drizzled over Herve This’ 2 ingredient chocolate mousse. So although this recipe isn’t exactly healthy as the olive oil is simply used as a flavouring, I don’t think icecream needs to be healthy. I mean, the idea of icecream is indulgence, no? Besides, the flavour of this icecream is wonderful, reminiscent of old fashioned Italian Gelato alla Crema thanks to all those egg yolks, but with a slight grassy note from the olive oil.

Olive oil gelato
Ingredients minimally adapted from http://megan-deliciousdishings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/re-creating-olive-oil-coppetta-at-otto.html?spref=tw, technique adapted loosely from F. Migoya

Ingredients

280ml milk
280ml whipping cream
250g sugar
6 egg yolks
160ml olive oil
Pinch of sea salt

Directions

1. Whisk 25g of the sugar into the 6 egg yolks until combined (this is not about beating air into the egg yolks so this should only take a few seconds and can be done by hand).

2. Gently heat the milk and cream in a saucepan.

3. When the mixture reaches 35 degrees celsius, add the remaining 225g of sugar and the egg yolk mixture. Stir to combine.

4. Stirring continuously slowly bring the mixture up to 85 degrees celsius. Once it reaches 85 degrees, take it off the heat and continue stirring for 2 minutes – this will help to pasteurise and homogenise the mixture.

5. Stir in the olive oil.

6. Pour the mixture through a sieve into a bowl sitting in an ice water bath and leave the mixture to cool for at least 4 hours before churning/freezing.

7. Churn in your icecream maker according to the manufacturers’ instructions before pouring the icecream into a container with a lid and putting it into the freezer.

While this icecream is incredible as it is, I loved it even more when I turned it into a grown-up version of an icecream sundae (which I think would be perfect for a summery after dinner treat) following these simple steps (which makes enough for 2 people):

First cut of thin strips of the peel of an unwaxes orange (trying to catch none of the white and bitter pith), slice the strips of peel into match-stick size strips.

Next, cut off thin slices off the top and bottom of the orange (so the orange can stand on a cutting board). Now carefully cut off the remaining pith and the thin skin covering the orange segments. Using a sharp small knife and holding the orange over a bowl to catch the orange juice, carefully cut out the orange segments. Pour the orange juice over the orange zest.

Place 2-3 small scoops of the icecream per person in two bowls. Divide the orange segments and orange zest between the two bowls, drizzle with a little bit of extra olive oil and scatter a small pinch of sea salt flakes on top.