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Crazy Crazy Weekend (includes recipe!)

Jul 13, 2014 · 4 minute read

Okay, so there’s times where I might go a little overboard. The idea was that I was having some people over on Saturday night (including a visiting Tammy, complete with her two GIANT DOGS on a road trip), and I was going to try and replicate a favourite from Kokyu: their Korean BBQ spare rib slides with fried tater tots. And along the way, I thought it was also time to experiment with the vacuum sealer. So in the vacuum sealer, we made:

COMPRESS ALL THE THINGS!

Compressed watermelon

Oh, and I also used the sealer to help make ice-cream. Time for a recipe break!

Everybody loves speculoos biscuits. And a lot of people love biscoff, where those biscuits are ground down, mixed with fat and soy lecithin and turned into a glorious spread of deliciousness. In the further interests of science, I wondered what would happen if I changed their state once again: from biscuit, to spread, to ice-cream.

The recipe was adapted from Eddie Shepherd’s chocolate ice cream recipe:

It’s a fairly easy recipe, providing you have a chamber vacuum sealer and a sous-vide set up (though probably manageable through traditional means too!). Melt the cream, butter, and biscoff together on a very low heat until mixed together. Blend together with all the other ingredients, pour into a vacuum seal bag, seal to a 40% vacuum and then cook for 20 minutes in a water bath at 82˚C. Chill in an ice bath, massaging the bag a few times as it cools. Store in the fridge overnight, and then churn for fifteen minutes or so in your standard home ice-cream maker. Leave it to set for a few hours in the fridge for serving.

BONUS RECIPE!

Speculoos Inception: Spoon out a table spoon of the ice-cream and sandwich it between two speculoos biscuits. YESSSSSS

speculoos inception: we heard you like speculoos

(if you do have the equipment, it’s worth doing it this way - there’s very little active work involved, you never have to worry about over-cooking the custard, and the ice-cream was favourably received by all, including those that normally abstain from sugar).

And then came a question: what would happen if you put pound cake in a vacuum sealer? We made a sacrifice. FOR SCIENCE.

cake slices, pre-vacuum

It’s…odd. It almost ends up looking like slices of cheese. Surprisingly tasty…and as Stacie pointed out, you could potentially toast it afterwards to make cake crostini. Which make happen in the near future.

cake slices, post-vacuum

Although the dinner went well, one occupant of the house was not happy. Oscar took one look at Max and spent the day hiding, either outside, or jammed tight under a bed. He never even saw Rory, which is probably just as well, seeing as how he’s almost twice the size of Max. As I write, he’s making rounds around the house, just making sure that the scary monsters have gone.

Anyway, I also had to go to Chapel Hill this weekend. Chapel Hill Comics has been my comic shop haunt going all the way back to 2002. They even held both series of Phonogram on a pull list for me when I was coming to NC twice a year, which was pretty amazing seeing as how I wouldn’t pick them up for about six months. The owner, Andrew Neal, has decided to sell the shop on after eleven years of running the business, and today was his last day of ownership (he’ll still be around over the next few months to advise the new owner). So I had to go and say goodbye to the owner of the first comic shop I’ve regularly visited that has lasted longer than six months (I…had a very bad record in the 90s to the point where I felt bad visiting any).

Also, lunch at IP3. It is never a disappointment, but today, at 12 noon, it was already full of Argentina fans with drums, dancing, and singing. Plus four Germans in the corner looking a bit sheepish. I’m guessing that a few hours later, the Germans had a little more to smile about…