By: Hannah Oppenheimer
Recipes, ,

Rosemary Chocolate Chunk Sea Salt Ice Cream

The inspiration for this ice cream flavor comes from the best cookies on earth. My partner mostly follows Kenji’s recipe from The Food Lab. But he likes to add either rosemary (finely chopped) or sage leaves (infused in the butter + whole fried on top) from our garden. You didn’t know you wanted herbs in your cookies, but trust me, you do.

Chocolate Chunk Sea Salt cookies laid out on a cooling rack on a marble counter top. Each cookie has a fried sage leaf on top
The best cookies on earth, based on The Food Lab recipe, but herbaceous, my new favorite word.

The rosemary flavor is really nice during the winter holidays, especially if you’re stuck in Texas with no snow and no Christmas tree. So I’m sharing this now in the hopes that you make some this season for your friends and family, who will mock you for saying things like “subtle notes of evergreen on the nose”.

Chopped rosemary steeping in hot milk You want to chop the rosemary enough to extract those oils, but not so much that you can’t strain it all out after steeping it in the hot milk. Hope that’s scientific enough!

A small bowl of ice cream on a red pot holder in front of some cut rosemary

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cup whole milk
  • 2 cup heavy cream
  • 1/2 cup milk powder
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 4 egg yolks
  • 3 sprigs* of rosemary, roughly chopped, not too small
  • 6 g. or (about 2 tsp) sea salt flakes like this
  • 6 oz. dark chocolate chunks

Directions

  1. Heat the milk, cream, milk powder, and sugar over medium-low heat and stir lightly until the powder and sugar are dissolved. Turn off the heat.
  2. Temper the egg yolks by adding about 1/2 cup of the hot milk mixture into a bowl of egg yolks, and whisk to combine. Then, add the egg yolks into the milk-cream mixture on the stovetop. Mix to combine. Turn the heat back to medium. Cook, stirring occasionally, until it reaches between 74-78 degrees C on a candy thermometer. Turn off the heat.
  3. Add the rosemary and steep for 1 hour. Strain and place in a covered container in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours.
  4. Churn your ice cream according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. When it has almost finished churning, add in the chocolate chunks and sea salt flakes until all combined. Place your ice cream in safe storage in the freezer for a few hours or overnight to solidify.
  5. Scoop and enjoy!

* Size of my sprigs:

3 sprigs of rosemary the size of my wrist to the end of my middle finger