Green Tea What?

Stephen wanted to learn to cook salmon, so this week I settled on a menu of pan-seared Asian-style salmon, steamed broccoli and basmati rice.

The fish was marinated in rice vinegar, fresh ginger, mirin, and soy sauce and was accompanied by two sauces—wasabi and sweet honey-soy. Stephen and Dominique teamed up and prepped the salmon and sauces while Gabriella took on the rice and broccoli. Nicolette, David, and Matt got to work on some hippenmasse (or tuile) cookies to go with dessert. What was dessert, you ask? Well, you know, here's where I could distract everyone with a discourse on the humble tuile, because tuiles are interesting and fun. Their sweet, sometimes almond-y, thin, crispy goodness is loved by one and all. And they can be molded into a variety of interesting shapes, which makes for some good old-fashioned kitchen fun. See? There you were, right there, running off on your own personal tuile tangent, right? Me too!

Alright, alright, the dessert. I'll admit that until Friday I'd never made Green Tea Ice Cream, but it seemed like the perfect end to our Asian-inspired menu with the bonus of being green for the upcoming St. Patrick's Day celebrations. I'd also recently had good success with Chai Tea chocolate, so I ran with it. I even did my matcha (green tea powder) research and found one produced expressly for creating green tea ice cream and desserts. I figured if they made it just for ice cream it had to be good.

Henry and Ove were eager to take on the task of making a custard-based ice cream in spite of (maybe because of) my warning that the ice cream was far and away the most difficult item on our menu. They took their job seriously and once they got past the initial confusion over egg whites and yolks they mixed and measured and whisked and tempered and they did it with some serious panache. Henry dutifully kept watch on the temperature while Ove stirred and stirred. The eggs cooked a little, but we managed to save the custard, cooled it, and put it in the machine to freeze. At that point all we could really say was that it was very, very green. We left it to do its thing while everyone took a turn cooking their salmon, then we stopped to eat.

Right around the time that last picture was taken the ice cream was ready. I tasted it and knew it was going to go over like a ton of bricks, but encouraged everyone to try it anyway. To my surprise, they all did, even after several of them ran to spit it out. The verdict? Green Tea Ice Cream tastes exactly like….green tea! Really, really strong green tea. The recipe is definitely not a keeper, but success is in the eye of the beholder and I beheld 11 budding chefs (Emily was in a big figure skating show and we missed her!) approaching this experiment with open minds. They were willing to challenge their taste buds and THAT is what this is all about.

(That said, I promise to make a tastier ice cream next week since they were such good sports about the Great Green Tea Experiment of 2008.)