Goofy: Are you sure you wanna eat...THAT?
Donald: Salty? No...Sweet!
[Music]
Hey, what's up guys, welcome back to Binging with Babish where this week,
we're taking a look at the sea salt ice cream from Kingdom Hearts 2,
the only known ingredients of which are sea salt and cream. So to me, this means gelato al fior de latte.
Or basically just a straight-up milk-based ice cream.
So it's important that we use very high quality
milk and cream (1 1/2 cups of each) because they, along with sea salt, are the only stars of the show.
Now, we've made ice cream and egg based-custards a few times on Binging with Babish,
so I'm just gonna kind of breeze through the process here. Into our large bowl go 4 egg yolks, separated from their whites,
and we're gonna add 3/4 cup of white sugar and whisk to combine until the mixture is thin, pale, and ribbony.
Meanwhile, we've had our milk and cream mixture on the stovetop heating to a bare simmer
Which we're going to scoop out about a cup of and slowly stream it into the egg and sugar mixture while whisking constantly.
This is going to temper the eggs and prepare them to be dumped back into the steaming milk mixture on the stovetop,
Again, while whisking constantly. Then we're gonna cook it for another minute or two over medium-low heat until it reaches 170 degrees Fahrenheit.
But there's a problem: this is too yellow. I don't know if you ever met blue and yellow, but they don't get along.
So to get rid of the egg yolks, we're going to try our hand at a cornstarch-based custard. In a small bowl,
we are tiny-whisking together 3 tablespoons of cornstarch with about 1 cup of our milk-and-cream mixture.
Once that's totally dissolved and no lumps remain, the remaining milk and cream head over to the stovetop and are brought to a near simmer.
Unlike the egg yolk custard, we're going to add the 3/4 cup of sugar
directly to the milk and cream on the stovetop and let that dissolve
over medium-low heat until just simmering, at which point we're going to add the cornstarch slurry and whisk until combined.
Let that cook for about 1 minute,
or until nice and thick while we contemplate our sea salt options.
Some dear friends of mine in Hawaii sent me this artisanal sea salt in an appropriately blue box.
And what's really cool is if you smell it— it doesn't really smell like anything,
it's just salt, but it's gonna be perfect for our ice cream.
So I'm gonna add about 1 heaping teaspoon's worth of it to our custard as it finishes thickening. Then we're gonna strain that into a
heat-proof bowl and compare it to our egg-based custard: as you can see,
It is much less yellow, so that when the time comes to add some gel-based teal food coloring, we don't have to worry about
the whole affair turning green. All this blue and yellow talk,
there's got to be a joke in there somewhere, something about the Blue Man Group and
yellow food of some kind, uh, "Wipe that green off your face"—
Never mind.
As you can see, cornstarch custard has a cleaner color compared to its egg custard cousin.
Into an ice cream machine, it goes for about 25 minutes.
Now, please bear in mind even though I said gelato earlier,
this is not gelato. Gelato's fat content is much lower than ice cream
So it's gonna be less stable in popsicle form,
which we are now gonna coax it into. As you can see, our custard is nice and thick but still pourable—
but it's still a little too thick to reliably fill these molds if we just pour it in there,
So I'm gonna use a piping bag to ensure that every nook and/or cranny is filled.
I was only able to yield about 6 popsicles out of this batch
but I'm not gonna beat myself up over it.
Then I'm going to apply my popsicle mold's stick alignment matrix
which is going to ensure that my popsicle sticks stand up straight. Once you've completed stick insertion,
it's time to put this guy in the freezer for at least 6 hours, up to overnight.
Don't leave them in there much longer because they're gonna get really hard to take out of the mold
and they're already pretty hard to take out of the mold.
This attempt was before I discovered the advent of running the whole thing under hot water, and I ended up with a pinched tip
but as you can see, we're pretty close and it tastes really, really good. The flavour, as Donald Duck describes it, is "Salty...
..."No, sweet!" And we used very high quality ingredients
So the flavor is simple and understated, but that's the essence of gelato al fior di latte. (Even though, like I said,
It's not gelato.)
But I'm curious to see if we can get this same kind of creamy texture without churning; in other words, with the use of stabilizers.
So to our cornstarch mixture, I'm also going to add
a packet of gelatin, whisk that in until fully hydrated, and then in place of sugar I'm going
to use glucose, which is about 70% as sweet as sugar by volume. So 3/4 cup of sugar weighs 5.3 ounces,
that's—let me just crunch the numbers here—
About 7.5 ounces,
which we are going to add directly to the milk-and-cream mixture on the stovetop and dissolve completely, before adding our thickeners.
Then from there, it's business as usual. We're gonna color with our teal food coloring and pipe directly into our molds.
And I think it's an even cleaner blue now, thanks to glucose powder being whiter than sugar.
Into the freezer It goes for six hours and this time, after running it under some hot water, the popsicles slide right out.
They're a little messy-looking because of the thickness of our mixture
But they taste great and they are ultra-smooth and creamy, all without churning.
Now, this blue ice cream bar from Kingdom Hearts was reportedly influenced by the sea salt ice cream served at Tokyo DisneySea,
which apparently contained vanilla, so you can optionally add that but if you use really good milk, there's no need for it.
This is a clear member of the clean stick club.
And as Donald Duck says...
"Salty...
*Babish breaks into laughter*
And as Donald Duck says,
"Salty? No...
*Babish again begins laughing*
*ahem*, I can do this...and as Donald Duck says, "Salty? No...sweet!"
*Babish laughs*