Chicago pastry chefs take new approach to ice cream
CHICAGO (WLS) -- As the pastry chef at mk, Lisa Bonjour is awfully proud of her latest seasonal dessert: an ode to campfires and s'mores.
"It's a chocolate ganache with a graham cracker crumble, Spanish peanuts and toasted marshmallow," she said.
The toasted marshmallows, intense ganache and graham cracker crumble were easy. Figuring out the ice cream? Not so much.
"For this dessert I wanted graham cracker ice cream but I realized that graham crackers were going to disintegrate too much," she said.
Enter a box of Golden Grahams.
"They hold their shape and you can steep them for a long time and squeeze all the flavor out of them," said Bonjour.
So they're whisked with milk and cream and egg yolks, plus sugar, creating a unique flavor that fits perfectly into the s'mores theme.
Just a mile or so away, in the West Loop, Cindy Schuman had a different dilemma: how to get ginger into an ice cream that would sit on top of a peach buckle.
"Ginger accents peaches so well, so I thought a good idea would be to incorporate that but I didn't just want to put some candied ginger would be too bright, I wanted a more of a rich feel," said Schuman, the pastry chef at Sepia.
So she opened a bag of ginger snap cookies, steeping them in half and half. Same procedure, adding sugar and tempering egg yolks, but then she also adds some powdered ginger and molasses, for extra richness. As for the cookies, they leave behind only a hint of their flavor.
"It's more the ginger flavor as opposed to the texture; it doesn't leave hunks of cookie in the ice cream. You can always add more cookie later if you wanted that sort of texture," she said.
So it doesn't really matter whether it's cereal or cookies, ice cream is very forgiving especially when paired with a little bit of chocolate or in this case, a little bit of fruit.
While the desserts may change, those ice cream flavors will likely stick around on both menus for some time.
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