Liquorice Ice-Cream

Last week I went to a fish restaurant locally called Verveine, in Milford-on-Sea. Verveine is run buy Chef Patron David Wykes, with a fishmonger at the front and a restaurant at the back. David and his team cook a variety of traditional and modern dishes. The one I particularly loved – we all loved – was a deconstructed sherbet dab. An intensely deep and rich liquorice ice-cream is topped with a scattering of sherbet – in this case icing sugar and Texturas Fizzy. I immediately ordered some Fizzy from my favourite supplier Infusions for Chefs, and got cooking.

I adapted my basis recipe for the lavender ice-cream, and added an additional 160g of Panda liquorice – now I would definitely go with the Panda brand, the liquorice is soft enough to melt adequately into the cream, and has the right intense earthiness you need for it to evoke all the right memories of a proper Sherbet Dab.

Ingredients
160g Panda liquorice (five bars in my case)

300ml whole milk
300ml double cream
4 large organic egg yolks
100g caster sugar

I literally put the whole thing in the thermomix, and cooked it at 80ºC for 5 minutes, speed 5. The main thermomix book tells you to take the mixture to 80º, and although the light was solid, I double checked the mixture with a digital thermometer. Leave it to cool, then pop into your ice-cream maker until it reaches the desired consistency.

Personally, I think I could easily have upped the liquorice even further, despite it being a higher ratio than I found in many other recipes. Still, I think it depends how much you like liquorice :0)

I didn’t particularly measure the sherbet, but I think was about 2 Tbsp icing sugar, 1 Tbsp Fizzy, and I popped in about 1 tsp of lemon powder because it happened to be on my counter. Blitz them together and taste! When you’re happy, sprinkle liberally on your liquorice and reminisce… [Looking at David’s dish again, might be worth putting a little bit in the bottom of the dish, then a smaller amount on top – rather than just chucking it onto the ice-cream :0)]

David’s Sherbet Dab

My Sherbet Dab