My latest issue of Cuisine Today arrived the other day, and in perusing it, I noted a recipe for a dessert tart made with fig jam, grape jam, pastry crust, and topped with blue cheese ice cream.
That final ingredient was composed of vanilla ice cream mixed with crumbled blue cheese, and the idea of it completely blew me away.
I’m no stranger to odd and varied flavors, having enjoyed strawberries with balsamic vinegar and sugar, cheesecake covered with sweet hot sauce, and so forth.
But the blue cheese plus ice cream combo had never crossed my mind. Yet a little googling reveals it to be not a new thing.
Anybody try it? How was it? I lack any decent blue cheese or vanilla ice cream in my house at the moment, else I’d be trying it firsthand.
Wow. What bienville asked - creamy or crumbly bits? I haven’t googled this yet. Sounds intriguing. Many years ago I made a tart from a recipe - pears, honey or brown sugar, blue cheese mixed in before baking and then served a la mode with vanilla ice cream. Sort of a similar blending of flavors. I made it for a dinner party and it can’t have been that wonderful because I don’t recall making it more than once.
I’ve also had garlic ice cream and it was very good, once you got past thinking “OMG this is weird, I am eating garlic ice cream.”
Man, I feel like Pavlov’s dog here, as soon as I saw your mention of this intrigueing combonation, the flavors coalesced between my mind and my tongue, and I imagine and taste it with a pear tart. Or even over apple or rhubard pie.
We still don’t know whether it is supposed to be vanilla ice cream with hunks of blue cheese in it, or if the ice cream and blue cheese are supposed to be blended together to a uniform consistency.
If we’re aiming for a uniform consistency, we still don’t know how to achieve that.
I imagine the vanilla ice cream with chunks of blue cheese added in as a later enrichment. kinda like the Ben and Jerry’s add in… treat like oreos or nuts.
The awesome ice creamery near my house had blue cheese ice cream for a very short time last summer -I think they were trying it out, and it didn’t go over well enough to make a second batch. I didn’t try it, but my friend had a sample spoon…she didn’t like it enough to have a scoop, but couldn’t stop thinking about the flavor afterwards. Then when she went back to have it for reals, it was gone…
Sounds like it’d be easy enough to make, for those of us with ice cream makers. I’d start with the basic vanilla custard. I’d also use a method from Cooks Illustrated for the blue cheese: use a fork to mash about 1/4 cup with some buttermilk (or, for ice cream, maybe just milk) until it resembles cottage cheese. (You could also mash it finer for better mixing throughout the custard, maybe). Combine the two, taste the custard, adjust sugar or seasonings, then freeze. Shouldn’t be too difficult.
As for how it’d actually taste, that I don’t know if I can speculate on. But the method shouldn’t be impossible.
