I find that many cities’ best ice cream is found outside of ice cream shops and in the pastry kitchens of the culinary world’s most creative minds. To boot, my favorite ice cream in New York City has for a long time been found at Superiority Burger, a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant famous for its sliders, umami-laden vegetables, and irreverence more than its truly extraordinary gelato and sorbet. Until recently, all I’ve known is that the reason it’s so good is that Brooks Headley, the shop’s owner and head chef, makes it. He once told me that he didn’t use eggs and that it has something to do with boiling the milk for a while, though he also later claimed not to know anything about making ice cream (a combination of humility and lying).
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But now he (with contributions from his team at Superiority Burger and many others who have helped along the way, to all of whom he gives liberal credit for the restaurant’s success) has published the restaurant’s eponymous recipe compendium, the aptly named “Superiority Burger Cookbook: The Vegetarian Hamburger is Now Delicious”. I am only a little sad that it doesn’t include his insane focaccia and bean soup recipes but I won’t dwell on this because the book is a treasure trove of insights, and he doesn’t appear to have held back on sharing the secrets of what makes the restaurant’s food sing. He certainly doesn’t with the ice cream.
This past week I got to work. The gelato recipes all have the same structure: mix the dairy and sugars, heat to a simmer (180 degrees F), hold the mixture there for thirty minutes while you infuse whatever the flavor is, then add salt, strain, cool, and let sit overnight before churning. Likewise, the sorbet recipes each use a consistent structure: a mixture of a pre-made syrup (water, sugar/sucrose, and dextrose) and a fruit puree (or chocolate). A pleasant surprise (but also not a surprise, given how good the ice cream is) is also that Dana Cree, the author of the best home ice cream cookbook written to date and co-owner of Chicago’s Pretty Cool Ice Cream, once upon a time helped design these base recipes with Brooks via late-night text message. But I digress.
The results are revelatory. I made chocolate sorbet (which is generally superior to chocolate ice cream if you love chocolate -- don’t @ me) and used the Superiority gelato base to make a black cardamom ice cream. The reason these recipes blew me away is that the results stay astoundingly soft in the freezer, with no stabilizers. The surprising yet subtle flavors (”cone” gelato and cherry vanilla sorbet, on my most recent visit) and impossibly soft texture right out of the freezer are what sets Superiority Burger’s ice creams apart from the rest.
A big part of the reason for that softness is the process. By heating the gelato base above , you denature proteins in the dairy, which allows them to bind with more water, functioning like a stabilizer. This allows you to avoid worrying about stabilizers in the first place, and to avoid using eggs, which can alter the flavor of the base (and which, especially among Superiority Burger patrons, many people don’t eat). Keeping the mix at a relatively low temperature reduces the risk of scalding the milk, but is more than high enough to denature those proteins (they start denaturing around 70 degrees C; 180 degrees F is about 80 degrees C). Holding the temperature there for thirty minutes requires a thermometer, a whisk, a watchful eye, and steady, low burner heat, but the results are well-worth it if you have the time and inclination (just try not to forget to halve the black cardamom if you’re halving the rest of the ingredients, or it might taste a little too strong).
I haven’t done a more detailed analysis of these recipes to see where they sit in terms of water/sugar/fat/solids ratios and now that I’m thinking about it, I should also check my freezer temperature (I moved recently) , but both the sorbet and the ice cream might be a little *too* soft, which could require some adjustments to refine for my home set-up and personal preference -- in other words, some trial and error. Delicious, delicious trial and error.
Speaking of which, I also tried to make the book’s polenta ice cream, but with all the cornstarch in the cornmeal it just turned into a thick pudding, which worked out okay because my girlfriend needed to bring dessert to a dinner party the next day.
