Banana Bread Ice Cream

Oh man, where the heck have I been? Well, sadly, no where. I didn’t go on vacation or anything. I have just been sitting on my tuchus, watching Big Love, reading the Twilight books, and eating way too much frozen, prepared, and/or take out food. Why, you ask? I don’t know. I just got really, very lazy and felt incredibly uncreative. And when I did manage to spend some time standing in front of the stove, my camera was no where to be seen and the mere thought of trying to blog about any of it was exhausting. How pathetic. I guess the end of summer vacation might do that to a person?

Well, I am going on vacation now, home to San Diego to see the fam, and I have plans for some cooking there which will definitely be shared. But I wanted to be sure to leave you with something small before I left. Small, but delicious: Banana Bread Ice Cream.

I’m a little bit ashamed of how infrequently I’ve touched the ice cream maker this summer. I had plans for lovely nectarine ice cream, and then in my bout of laziness, the nectarines went bad. Sigh. I did make a very small batch of butterscotch ice cream earlier in the summer, which was tasty but disappeared before I could share it here. I had plans for some peanut butter ice cream, some caramelized onion ice cream (yes, I’m serious), some pomegranate ice cream. And I know summer’s not over yet and there is still time for all of this, but it sure does feel like summer’s over.

Anyway, I did manage to churn out a batch of this stuff last week, and I must say I think it’s pretty spectacular. It really does taste just like banana bread with chocolate chips.

I used David Lebovitz’s recipe for Roasted Banana Ice Cream, which is easy and therefore excellent for people who are feeling very lazy. As it churned away, I added about a cup of chopped walnuts and a thin stream of melted chocolate, which breaks up in the frozen ice cream to form chocolate chips (stracciatella). All of this is so very easy that you really have no excuse (um, barring lack of an ice cream maker, allergy to walnuts, or distaste for bananas) not to try it at home.

Banana Bread Ice Cream

• 3 ripe bananas
• 1/3 light brown sugar
• 1 T. butter, cut into small pieces
• 1 1/2 c. whole milk (I actually used a combination of half and half and whipping cream, because that is what I had, and it seemed to work out just fine)
• 2 T. sugar
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• about 5 oz. semi-sweet chocolate
• 3/4 c. – 1 c. chopped walnuts

Preheat the oven to 400F. Cut the bananas into about half inch pieces, and toss them in a small baking dish with the butter and the brown sugar. Bake the bananas for about 40 minutes, stirring them around once midway through. Set them aside and let them cool off a bit.

Once they’ve cooled, mix the bananas with the milk, sugar, vanilla, and salt in a blender or food processor and puree until you have a nice, smooth mixture. Let it cool in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

When the mixture is nice and cold, just process it according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. When the ice cream is nearly thickened to your liking, break the chocolate up into a microwave safe container, preferably one with a pour spout, like a pyrex measuring cup (Um, pyrex is mircrowave safe, right?). Melt the chocolate at 10 or 15 second intervals, stirring between each interval, until it’s melted through and pourable. Slowly pour it into the almost finished ice cream; it will freeze and form small chips throughout the ice cream, which is pretty cool to watch. Finally, add the chopped walnuts and continue to process until the walnuts are mixed through and the ice cream has reached your desired consistency.

I do promise to come back soon and more frequently. Look forward to a Krier sibling blog post this weekend, as I coerce my brothers to join me in talking about cooking!