Saffron Ice Cream

In 1993, Steve Pope mentioned this on USENET group rec.food.cooking and it sounded interesting. We modified the basic French Vanilla ice cream recipe that came with our cheap ice cream maker, leaving out the vanilla so the saffron comes through. The amounts here just fit our maker. It’s made by Deni and cost about $40, and the same model Cuisinart sells for about twice that: it’s a metal bowl you chill in the freezer, and put it on a motor base that spins it under a lid that has a dasher paddle. Now that we live in Barcelona, we had to buy another machine because I missed this so much -- we have plenty of good ice cream here, but not saffron; it's a Duronic IM540 for 43€, with a top-mounted motor, which like the others, makes the pouring chute rather small for loading.

We had saffron from Whole Foods -- overpriced, poorly packaged, but reasonably tasty.  Next time we used the Spanish saffron we got from Penzey's. We haven’t yet tried very well priced stuff from saffron.com. In Barcelona, we can easily buy good quality saffron, even in our grocery store.

I like to serve this drizzled with a thin thread of ancient honey we have had lurking in our pantry -- it’s dark and intensely flavored and for some reason really complements the saffron. Of course you have to age the honey for a decade or two first :-)

0.2 g 1/8 tsp Saffron threads
15 ml 1 Tbs Brandy or Rum

3 3 Eggs
350 ml 1 1/2 Cup Whole Milk
475 ml 2 Cup Cream (heavy whipping cream, 36% fat)

200 g 1 Cup Sugar
1 pinch 1 pinch Salt

In BCN on 2024-10-15 I only had 400 ml cream so scaled down 85%, maintaining the Eggs and Saffron:

300 ml Milk

400 ml Cream

170 g Sugar

Crush and infuse Saffron threads in Brandy/Rum for 30 minutes or longer. A trick I learned from a Spanish chef on YouTube is to fold a piece of paper and crush the Saffron inside with the back of a spoon or similar -- it produces a fine powder.

Whisk Eggs, Milk and Cream together in large saucepan, over double boiler if you're worried about curdling.
Add Sugar and Salt and cook over low heat (double boiler) at 78-80C / 170-175F stirring constantly until thickened and a custard is formed, about 15 minutes; close to the final temperature it will start to thicken quickly so be careful.
The mixture should coat the back of a spoon.
Cool, then add Saffron Brandy mixture; the mixture must be cool before adding any alcohol like Vanilla extract or Saffron Brandy, or it may explode. Mix well.

This original amounts should make 4 1/2 C mixture, the max our ice cream maker can handle. The reduced amount above seemed about right, making 900 ml chilled mix, and not overflowing our Duronic ice cream maker.

Sorry about the bands in the photo below, a weird interaction between the camera and LED lights strobing.

Churn in ice cream maker per its instructions, transfer into containers and cover snugly with film to prevent ice crystals, then freeze overnight to set.

Film pressed against the ice cream. Again with the strobe-bands :-(