Sabayon Method

Okay everyone...time to take a brief break from my Harry Potter marathon for a little blogging!

Most of you know that I spend a lot of my time at Clemson making and selling ice cream. I also did an internship last summer working at Boulder Ice Cream in Colorado so I think it's fair to say I'm pretty experienced in the ice cream field. Every time I've made it though, I've always used base mix. All ice creams start with a basic mix, basically eggs, cream, sugar and stabilizers, and then flavorings and variegates are added to get whatever type of ice cream you desire. We get ours sent to us at Clemson using the original Clemson recipe and at Boulder I got to help make our own base using holding tanks and pasteurization equipment. But never did I get to make ice cream base at home or in a kitchen! It was SO easy, too (thanks to my make-shift double boiler).

This recipe was made using the sabayon method...everything you do in a kitchen sounds so much cooler when you use the French term for it. It was really simple because it only used three ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and heavy cream. I may have also added a little vanilla extract...actually, I probably did.

Okay, first I should start off by saying I do NOT look cute when I go into work. Wearing a little makeup would be useless because it would melt off before my shift was halfway through and there's no point in doing my hair if it's just gonna hide under my hat (nobody likes hair in their food!).
So, this sabayon starts off by whisking the egg yolks and sugar together over a double boiler. In a separate bowl, I heated the cream to scalding. You just keep whisking and whisking and whisking until the yolks are cooked. You'll know when you've reached that point when they start to get thick and lighter in color.

They should look like this! You can kind of see how they are falling back in ribbons into the bowl and they've gotten a little lighter in color.

Once the yolks are cooked, the mixture is ready for the cream. I took the yolk mixture off the double boiler so they wouldn't continue to cook and placed the bowl over a towel for balance.  When I started doing this, I felt kind of like an octopus because I was ladling cream, whisking eggs, balancing the bowl, and trying to take pictures for the blog...

Since the cream was hot, I had to slowly add it to the eggs using a technique called tempering. It basically just means adding a little at a time to bring the eggs up to temperature so they didn't become scrambled...that would've sucked.

Thankfully, one of my line cooks stepped in to take pictures for me! Check out this action shot...

Once all of the cream was added, I sent the mixture through a strainer to make it really nice and smooth. You can see how much lighter the mixture has gotten but my sabayon was actually TOO EGGY still! The recipe called for 12 egg yolks and I, trying to out- smart the process, used liquid, pasteruized yolks that they use in the bakery (the bakers told me 1 yolk is approximately 1 ounce) instead of separating out whole eggs on my own. When I finally turned this into ice cream, it was more like frozen custard but it was still delicious. I probably raised the kitchen's cholesterol levels a good bit that day.Rookie mistake.

The last thing I did was put the mixture over an ice bath to cool it down. This was the finished product! I was pretty proud of myself for making homemade ice cream base.

For those of you wondering, I used this to make Cap'n Crunch flavored ice cream. It was all gone before I had a chance to get a picture though ;)

Bon appetit!