I’m back again with another ice-cream recipe!

This one was the husband’s idea. I was just asking him what ice-cream flavour I should make next and he said black sesame. If you’ve not had it before, it sometimes can be found at Japanese restaurants and Japanese supermarkets. And it’s always black sesame, not white sesame.

Black sesame ice-cream is not pretty. In fact, it looks a bit like cement. But it is very delicious. It has an almost nutty flavour, without the nuts of course.

It was a bit harder to find a black sesame recipe and to be honest, after trying a coconut ice-cream recipe online that did not work at all, I’m wary of online ice-cream recipes. So far the ice-cream recipes I’ve used are from David Leibovitz’s book The Perfect Scoop, or adapted from there. And once you get that custard recipe down, you can try experimenting with different flavors, and that is what I did here.

I did check out recipes online for how to get that sesame paste and while some of them recommended making your own, I didn’t have a food processor and wasn’t quite sure that my immersion blender would do a good job with grinding up the sesame. So instead I went to my local Asian supermarket and looked for black sesame paste. It wasn’t the kind recommended by blogs like Just One Cookbook who used a Japanese brand.

What I found was a Taiwanese-made paste and for some reason, several different kinds of sesame powder. Apparently black sesame drinks are a thing in Taiwan (and it seems in Korea too). In Singapore you can find a hot Chinese dessert that is called Black Sesame Soup, where the sesame is ground fine and often thickened with rice. Black sesame paste is also found in sweet rice flour dumplings called tangyuan. And looking up black sesame recipes, I found this intriguing Black Sesame Porridge recipe, made with rice and black sesame.

And here is my Black Sesame ice-cream recipe

4 tbsp Black Sesame powder
3 tbsp Black Sesame paste
1 cup (250ml) whole milk
2 cups (500 ml) heavy cream
5 egg yolks
120g brown sugar
Big pinch of salt

Warm the milk, sugar and 1 cup of the heavy cream in a medium saucepan. Stir in the Black Sesame powder and salt. Do not boil.

Place remaining 1 cup of heavy cream in large bowl (I use a big pyrex measuring cup). In a medium bowl, whisk yolks. Slowly pour some of the warmed milk mixture into the egg yolks to temper them. And then add the warmed egg and milk mixture back into the saucepan.

Keep stirring over medium heat until the custard forms. The custard should coat your spatula and I test this by running my finger down the spatula and if that little line my finger makes remains, you’re all done. Remove from heat.

Pour the custard into the cream. Usually I put a strainer over the cream and pour it through but I wasn’t sure if that would sift out the black sesame! So I skipped that bit.

Stir in the Black Sesame paste, making sure to scrape the bottom.

You can cool this in an ice bath or cover with plastic wrap and pop into the fridge. Chill it thoroughly for a few hours at least. And then follow your ice-cream machine’s instructions.

 

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