My Fourth Week of Production: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream and Peach Melba Vegan Frozen Dessert

On Wednesday, I made my most-fun ice cream so far: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. I think it's going to be a hit.

For the dough, I followed the Chips Ahoy! recipe from BabyCakes Covers the Classics with one exception: I omitted the baking soda. Because this dough doesn't need to rise.

Here's a photo of my big mass of dough, which was a tripling of the recipe in the book, or enough to make 108 cookies:

Why would I use a vegan and gluten-free cookie dough in a dairy ice cream? I'm glad you asked yourself that question, Bill. While it's true that many people who can't digest gluten also can't digest dairy protein, others can and so would appreciate a GF ice cream. And I also wouldn't want to use raw egg in an unbaked dough. And I also happen to really like this dough and have made several batches of actual baked cookies from it over the years. Although I have to say, when I started consuming a pint of this ice cream the past two nights, I found myself wanting more sweetness in the cookie dough. Maybe that's because freezing it reduces the sensation of sweetness. Because I haven't found the cookies I've baked to be undersweet.

I asked my new best girlfriend Sheila, who worked with me in the CR&GC kitchen Wednesday and today, whether she found the cookie dough to be sweet enough. She said she did, but she thought the vanilla ice cream could be more vanilla-y. I'm looking forward to getting feedback from customers about this flavor on Sunday. I think it's very good, but I imagine it could become even better.

Today, I made a new vegan frozen dessert flavor, Peach Melba. I didn't think it was going to happen until next week, and I'll tell you why.

As you can tell if you've been keeping up with my blog here, I've settled into a pattern of picking fruit at Phillips Farms on Mondays to use in an ice cream or VFD later in the week. This past Monday, I picked red raspberries and peaches to make a VFD out of; almost exactly four years ago, when Tony and I were living in the West Village—and we still had our Rudy boy, the canine inspiration for the Huge Hound brand—I made a wonderful Peach Melba Sorbet that I wanted to re-create as a VFD.

The peaches were rather hard when I picked them. I wasn't sure at the time which day I was going to be able to use the kitchen, but I wanted to make everything in one day, if I could, to save on rental expenses. I read online that if you want to hasten the ripening of peaches, you should store them in a bag; the ethylene released by the fruits is said to speed up the ripening process.

I did that. And I ended up with one soft peach and many others that were still hard and covered in fuzz. Of the moldy, not the natural peach fuzz, variety.

This morning, I drove to Solebury Orchards, a wonderfully inviting farm with a store that's so charming, you want to put a La-Z-Boy recliner in the corner, let a friendly dog cozy up next to you, and settle in for the day with a book and several cups of tea. It's just over the Pennsylvania border and a place I'd been meaning to revisit sometime soon anyway.

There were two women at SO who made it possible for me to pull off my Peach Melba VFD today. They searched through some baskets of peaches that were considered seconds (even though they looked perfectly fine to me) and found about 20 that would be ripe enough for me to use today. Woot!

I learned a couple things about peaches today from those ladies: The fruits lose a bit of sweetness if you leave them on the tree until they're perfectly ripe and soft; that's why they're picked in a state that requires you to wait a couple days or so before you can eat them. Also, do not put them in a bag to ripen, no matter what it says on the Internet; put them in a warm spot with air circulation.

After peeling and pureeing the peaches in a blender, and adding some lemon juice to offset the browning caused by oxidation, I made about 17 cups of peachy goodness. To hedge my bet on the sweetness of the peaches, most of which would probably have benefited from another day of rest in a sunny location, I added an extra cup of agave beyond what I typically use in a VFD. And in a nod to the vanilla ice cream that's a component of traditional peach Melba, I stirred in 2 tablespoons of vanilla extract after I'd combined my VFD base with the peach puree.

For my raspberry sauce, I utilized a recipe from an ice cream master I've mentioned on here before: Jeni Britton Bauer of Columbus, Ohio–based Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams. The sauce consists of just raspberries and sugar, boiled until the mixture reaches 220 degrees Fahrenheit; the recipe is in Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home.

I didn't take a glamour shot of the Peach Melba VFD by itself, so here's a photo of both of the new flavors together:

You can try them both for yourself at the Hunterdon Land Trust Farmers' Market from 9 to 1 on Sunday.