My First Week of Production

On Wednesday and Thursday, I made my first frozen desserts for sale using my new batch freezer.

If you've ever watched the contestants on Chopped make ice cream, you know what a batch freezer looks like. My machine is smaller than the model in the Chopped studio's kitchen, but it's nonetheless a wonderful piece of equipment that can crank out 3 quarts of ice cream or vegan frozen dessert in about 8 minutes, even when the custard is still rather hot.

I'd reserved the kitchen at the Croton Rod & Gun Club for only a half day on Wednesday, long enough to figure out how to prepare and use the batch freezer and make some Pineapple Sage Vegan Frozen Dessert.

I'd been growing the pineapple sage on our deck. I took that photo in mid-June, so the plants had gotten a good deal bigger by the time I harvested a bunch of sprigs—as much as I thought the plants could safely bounce back from—on Wednesday.

At the club, I steeped the PS in the two biggest liquid components of my VFDs: hemp milk and flax milk.

I removed the sprigs and continued with the rest of my recipe. I'd used a lot of the herb, but I was concerned I needed still more to get the amount of pineapple flavor I wanted.

I poured my finished custard into the machine, and it came out looking like this:

The good news was, the texture was spot-on. The bad news was, it didn't taste like pineapple. My new friend Sheila, who was also working in the club's kitchen that day, agreed with my assessment.

I took the VFD home, put it in the freezer to completely solidify, and ate a bowl of it last night with some blackberries and chocolate chips on it.

It was like the vegan equivalent of Sweet Cream Ice Cream: a blank canvas on which to impose flavorful things. 

Thursday's VFD turned out much better: Chocolate Ginger. It's the VFD flavor I've developed that I'm most proud of. Tony, my husband and biggest booster, says I could roll it out nationally. 😃

I also made a dairy ice cream: Lemon Verbena. I again used sprigs of herb I'd grown myself. Given that I had more of this herb—and its flavor is stronger than that of pineapple sage—I was pretty confident the lemon verbena–ness would shine through. And it did.

I made a rookie mistake while processing the second of three subbatches of the ice cream: I left it in the batch freezer too long, and only a trickle of it came out the little door. The rest was frozen up inside the machine. Sheila helped me scrape it out and into my pot, and then I packed it into pint-size containers.

I'll make some more VFDs and ice creams, in greater volumes, this coming Wednesday and Thursday, and I should be all set to start selling them at the Hunterdon Land Trust Farmers' Market outside Flemington on Sunday, July 31.