Feeling fall: Brown butter ice cream

Do you feel it?  It's in the air.  Temperatures in the morning are in the high 60s, sometimes you don't need the air conditioner at night, and the apples, the celery root,  and the butternut squash are beginning to populate the market.  It's the time of year which Annalena always thinks of as "purple" in terms of  eating locally:  in the early spring  it's pale green, followed by pink (rhubarb, strawberries), then dark green and red, and pink.  Now, with plums, eggplants, and stuff like that , Annalena thinks of it as purple.

Ray Bradbury, in the wonderful "Dandelion Wine," which you should ALL read immediately, has a line about how the grandparents start speaking of coffee instead of lemonade when sitting on the porch after dinner.  Now, how much can you pack into one, simple sentence ?  It's wonderful.   Annalena begins to think of cinnamon, and cooked cabbage, and she pulls out her collard greens recipes.

And the plums.  Oh, the plums.  Honestly, Annalena cannot say that her favorite fruit, is plums, but they may be the fruit she most enjoys cooking.  There are so many kinds, so many colors, and so many textures.  Years ago, for a farewell party for her sweety Fred, Annalena made a trio of plum sorbets, each of which was based on a different plum.  She could have made an eight pack of them.

Now, all this talk about plums, because it was thinking about plums, and remembering a dish at her bud  Ryan's restaurant "All Good Things," that led Annalena to start investigating the idea of a brown butter ice cream.

"Brown butter," for those of you new to the term, is butter melted very slowly, and allowed to brown.  It's that simple, except it's not.  You have to watch this very carefully when it's happening, and you have to stop the cooking at just about one half shade of brown below what you want, because the butter will keep cooking.  If you want to be absolutely pure about it, then you cool it, and take the milk solids off the top, because there will be little burnt bits of milk protein in it.  They will look like vanilla beans, but they're not.  Annalena doesn't mind them, but if you do, well, you know what you have to do.  If you want them out, this recipe winds up taking longer to make, but it's still worth doing.  Butter ice cream.  Geez. You get butter, cream, milk, and eggs in one dish.   Thank goodness you're eating it with fresh plums, huh?

Ok, to make the brown butter.  Put a stick of the stuff in a small pot, and heat it very, very slowly.  Keep an eye on it.  If you use a light colored pan, it is very easy to tell when the butter is at a brown color. You are looking for something akin to a hazelnut.  When you get there, pour the stuff into a bowl off the heat, to try to keep it from going even further.  Let it cool, while you collect your other ingredients.

You will need a cup of dark brown sugar, six egg yolks, two cups of heavy cream, and a cup of whole milk.  You can add some salt to this if you like, or you can use salted butter.  Annalena prefers the former, becase that way she can control the saltiness of the final product (if you haven't figured it out by now, Annalena is a control empress).

When the butter has cooled to just slightly warm, mix it, the butter and the egg yolks all together.   Get a nice even mix.  Then, put this in a pot with the dairy products and cook it to a very, VERY soft custard stage.    When you get there, get that off the heat, perhaps by pouring it into one of the bowls you've used already.  And then pour it into a container, and let it cool at room temperature.

Annalena needs to say that cooling to room temperature here, is important.  It seems that if you put the stuff directly into the refrigerator, the butter solidifies, rather than remaining emulsified, and you get chunks of butter in your dessert.  Some of you may like that, but most of us don't.

Then, out comes your ice cream maker, and you know what to do.

Annalena feels this ice cream goes with just about anything, but think about "fall."  As she said, plums.  Or apples.  Or pears.  Or a cinnamon cake, or roll.  Or, just plain.  Enjoy it.  Relish the turn of the seasons, together with this lovely song, perhaps Annalena's favorite version of a classic.  Thank you, Johnny Mercer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcNE85-aD6s