Coffee Ice-cream

Glace au Café (Coffee Ice Cream) teaches the cleanest lesson in infusion: coffee needs heat to yield its perfume, but time turns perfume bitter. Crush freshly roasted beans at the last minute, cover them with milk just off the boil, and give them twenty minutes, no more. The finished glace should taste of coffee first and sugar second, with a silken finish from crème anglaise, the pourable egg custard that gives French ice cream its body.

The original kitchen roasted its own beans, crushed a brigade quantity, and froze the mixture in a sorbetière, the hand-cranked freezing pail packed with ice and salt, while someone kept the paddle moving. At home, beans from a good roaster, a mortar or rolling pin, and a countertop churner do the same honest work. I have halved the book's two-ounce coffee charge and two-pint liquid scale to one ounce against one pint of milk, enough for about a quart. On-premise roasting and the hand-cranked tub were brigade scaffolding; the ratio, the twenty-minute infusion, the egg-yolk emulsion, and the churning stay because they are the dish. One cook, one stove, one evening, provided the churn bowl is already frozen.

The decisive step comes before the custard: strain the beans the moment the twenty minutes are up, and don't press them. If the crème anglaise later catches at the pan's edge, ça se rattrape, and the method will show you how; coffee steeped into bitterness does not. Crush or grind it at the last minute, because its finest perfume is already leaving within the hour.