Sunday my friends downstairs and I were invited to dinner. I volunteered to make dessert.
Two jars of dulce de leche had been sitting in my cabinet since I brought them back from Argentina in April. They're about to expire. I wanted to put the dulce de leche to good use. I went through a list of possibilities.
Alfajores? These are basically dulce de leche sandwich cookies. Nah. A dulce de leche and Mexican chocolate crepe torte? That is one of my favorite dessert recipes, but not this time.
Ice cream. First it was going to be ice cream sandwiches, with dulce de leche ice cream between two chocolate cookies. But that isn't very authentic. And I wasn't going to make just dulce de leche ice cream, because, as you will see, that is almost too simple.
In Buenos Aires, one of the ways to tell a good ice cream shop from a bad one was to taste their banana split flavor. If it had a chemical tang, they had cheaped out and used artificial banana flavor. If it had chunks of banana, you might be on to something. Next, examine the chocolate. It was never bitter enough for me, because I like very dark chocolate. But was it chopped into satisfyingly jagged bits? Were there large chunks and small chunks? Finally, consider the ribbon of dulce de leche. Was it good enough that you sometimes heaped a spoonful of only that and brought it to your lips?
I decided to recreate banana split ice cream. Instead of incorporating a ribbon of unadulterated dulce de leche into banana ice cream, I created a swirl of two flavors: banana chocolate chunk, and dulce de leche.
I used this recipe for the dulce de leche ice cream, omitting the pecans and adding a dash of salt. I don't trust an ice cream recipe that doesn't include at least a pinch of salt.
The banana chocolate chunk recipe was more complicated. I based it loosely on David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop recipe for roasted banana ice cream. But after I roasted the bananas, I tasted them and realized I didn't want the butterscotchy, caramelized notes that roasting the bananas imparted. The dulce de leche already had those flavors covered. So I used one-third roasted bananas and two-thirds raw bananas. There is remarkably little added sugar in this recipe, especially if you take away the brown sugar from the roasting pan. The dulce de leche itself is so sweet, though, that this is not a problem.
I roughly chopped some 72% dark chocolate and tossed it into nearly frozen banana ice cream.
I spread the dulce de leche ice cream into a tub and layered the banana chocolate chunk on top of it.
It was great.
Afterward I stepped outside myself for a moment and realized that no one else at the table really had any context for it. We were all eating the ice cream, but no one but me had anything else to compare it to, or any memories attached to it.
But, yeah, it was good.
No photos of the finished product because it was brought out at a dinner party for God's sake and, no, I am not going to go snapping photos of my ice cream at someone else's dinner table for the Internet because this is really not that blog.