A recipe for black sesame ice cream

Impossibly good

I learned how to make this recipe at a restaurant that was too clever for it's own good.

The food was amazing there. The menu was fun and modern and surprising, and the team that made it really knew what they were doing.

Unfortunately, some of the recipes were just a bit too complicated, a bit too thoughtful to find a regular customer base. And as good as the dishes were, the restaurant closed after barely a year. A very common story in the restaurant world.

I feel pretty honoured to have experienced working in that place, and I am very happy to be able to share our recipe for black sesame ice cream, which is a little different to other such recipes I’ve seen because of our use of a few Swedish ingredients.

This is one of my favourite ice creams and the use of Swedish sour cream (called grädfill) gives it a lightness that compliments the rich nuttiness so well.

Enjoy!

Black sesame ice cream

Ingredients

500g grädfill (if you can’t find this, sour cream is a good alternative)
110g icing sugar
20g glucose
1/2 sheet of gelatine
80g roasted black sesame seeds (crushed in a morter and pestle/blender)
15g sesame oil

Method

Warm up half the grädfill with the glucose and icing sugar.

Soften the gelatine in cold water and add to the warm grädfill/glucose/sugar. Mix well until fully dissolved.

Finally, throughly mix this in with the rest of the grädfill, sesame seeds and sesame oil.

Now, at this point in the restaurant we would freeze this all in what is called a pacojet container. A pacojet is (basically) a very expensive blender that lets you blitz ice cream/sorbet into a super fine texture without the need for churning.

Since we don’t have one of these at home, a standard blender is the next best thing.

So, freeze the unchurned ice cream mix. Once it is solid, cut it into cubes and blitz until smooth. Freeze this again. This process will have broken down the sesame seeds further to leave your ice cream a very elegant silvery grey colour and a smooth yet pleasingly textured consistency.

In the image below, we have garnished with whole toasted black sesame, a little meringue and a drizzle of sesame oil.

Enjoy!