ICE CREAM/HELADO

Who could have known what would happen when I got back to La Cusinga and turned on
the ice cream maker. It seems that Dos Pinos, the only commercial ice cream producer in
the country is just not fulfilling the needs of a country (or at least a specific region) full
of ice cream eaters. It sems that their pallid flavors and ice cream product (!) filled with
preservatives is just not cutting the proverbial mustard with aficionados of the real deal.
From the time I fired up the machine for the first run until now, I have been struggling to
keep a minimum of three flavors in my freezers. All of my desserts are now
accompanied by ice cream and I have begun to sell it to other small restaurants in our
community and will begin purveying it at the feria in Uvita soon. And when I go back to
the States in July, there will be a second machine waiting for me so I can keep up with the
demand.

When I packed my suitcases full of supplies, clothing and equipment necessary to my

returning to my status as Chef of the Jungle, one of the things high up on my list of
necessaries was an ice cream maker. In my previous incarnation here at La Cusinga we’d
purchased one of the smaller Cuisinart models, the one that resembles, purely for reasons
of quaintness and kitsch, an old fashioned ice cream maker. It did what it was supposed
to do, make ice creams, only it did it in smallish quantities and was not constructed in a
fashion sturdy enough for even our mini-industrial production. We (or I) blazed through
that one in the first month, destroying first the slender and fragile whisk that turns the ice
cream against the frozen drum, and ultimately the drum itself, which did not survive its
four foot drop to the concrete floor.

So this time, well-educated as to the limitations of the smaller model, I bought the biggest
model that Cuisinart makes; a modern looking brushed aluminum baby with a two quart
drum. It came packed in a large box and my first challenge was how to get it packed into
a suitcase for traveling. I had also purchased a heavy duty Cuisinart food processor and
needed to devise a method of packing it as well. I had one large wheeled suitcase, but it
was immediately apparent that if I wished to get both machines and my modest wardrobe
down to Costa Rica I was going to need another suitcase of equal size.

I cruised on down to Austin’s Academy; a giant box store that despite its name that makes
it sound like a kinky phone-sex site, is instead a wonder of a sporting goods and clothing
store with travel necessaries thrown in for good measure. I only wanted the large
suitcase, but ended up buying a four piece luggage set, that nested, one inside the other,
for a whopping $49.95. I immediately went on Craigslist, advertised the three smaller
pieces and sold them that afternoon for $40. Not a bad deal.

I did a test run with the big suitcase to the West Coast to say my good-byes for six
months and to do a clothing exchange with some items in my Dad’s garage in Oregon.
On the flight from Austin to Portland the new suitcase developed an immediate split
alongside the zipper and had to be duct-taped in San Francisco in order to make it back to
Austin without spilling my odd lots into the baggage compartment of the plane. I trotted
back to Acadamy with the damaged bag and the bespeckled, complexion challenged,
possible highschool graduate of a checker let me do a quickie exchange without even
examining the merchandise. Had I been of a mind to, I could have taken another four
piece set rather than just the largest suitcase that held the others, but I was tired of
Craigslist.

This time the packing was for real and I had decided that the best tact would be to put
each piece of equipment on top of a few teeshirts in the center of the suitcase and pile my
other clothing around the boxes in an attempt to cushion them. I had removed my
precious cargo from the packing crates it had come in, but it still rested inside the factory
boxes, which were of substantial size. It was immediately apparent that the closing and
final zipping of each of the suitcases would indeed be challenging. Undaunted, I packed
on and when it came time to do the final zip it took having my brother in law, Pete,
kneeling on the suitcases while I tugged at the not nearly large enough zipper pulls to get
the damn things shut. But shut they finally did, packed near to bursting and man were
they heavy.

It was clear at the Continental Airlines scales just how heavy. Each of the bags weighed
in at just about 65 pounds. Yeah they were a little over weight, but I was proud of my
equal weight distribution. I paid the overage, just happy to be able to get those monsters
into the cargo hold. I got on the plane with impunity and when I opened them on the
other end the merchandise proved to have traveled perfectly and there were those happy
little notices from the airline security that they had even been opened. I spent a moment
or two wondering how they had gotten them closed but then decided I’d rather not know.

Once at La Cusinga I eagerly popped open the ice cream machine box and got down to
the business of unpacking the parts and reading the manual. It seemed simple enough
and I eagerly and happily leapt into my newest chef skill; “ice cream maker.” The first
batch was fittingly, vanilla, just to keep it classic and see how my new toy worked and it
came out just fine. I was ready to get tropical on this baby and shortly thereafter
followed banana, chocolate banana, mango and strawberry. And yes, there are plenty of
strawberries here in the lower mountain areas of Costa Rica. It took a little bit of getting
used to working with different fruit purees as they all held different amounts of water,
and I found that the denser fruits, particularly banana and mango took quite well to the
simple mix with cream and milk.

The next big breakthrough came when an old friend, the erstwhile Brit, Billy Bateman,
showed up at my door with bags of organic polvo de cacao. That is, freshly dried,
unfined cacao beans ground and unprocessed. Included in them is the crunch of the bean,
but also the pure cocoa butter that is fined out of commercial cocoa powders. I’ve know
Billy since virtually the first day I set foot in this country and I’ve known well that he is
now and always will be a man with a scheme, a plan, a brilliant moneymaking idea. I
had seen Billy design and hang bamboo curtains, render models of bamboo villages and
patios, middleman vehicle sales and live penniless high in the Costa Rican mountains
helping to construct a model “free village” that would provide a home to all who
contributed.
This was Billy’s latest dream project; to act as the liason between the cacao grower and
the wave of chefs (I would be the first) who would put his polvo in huge demand.
Billy’s dream wasn’t going to end up making him a fat purse of money, but it provided
me with a wonderfully unique medium upon which to take my next ice cream step. I
futzed and ditzed with the polvo a bit before realizing that it worked best, simply sieved
(which was no easy proposition) and added to a classic ice cream mix of cream and milk.
I did make on major recipe change by substituting our local raw sugar, tapa dulce, which
comes in huge dense rounds, for the commercial sugar the recipe called for.

And the resulting ice cream was amazing. It was different both flavor-wise and
texturally. It wasn’t chocolate and it wasn’t cocoa. It was truly unique and the crunch in
each bite from the ground beans was unlike anything I’d ever encountered in ice cream.
Almost unwilling to believe how good it was I offered tastes to some hotel guests; my
unknowing guinea pigs. They were effusive in their praise and you could see that need
for another bite shining in their little obsessive eyes. This one was a real winner and I
realized that I might be the only one of the face of the planet doing it this way. What a
find!

I served it, initially, just by itself, alone in a bowl, but couldn’t help thinking that it
needed another texture, smoother and more unctuous, to really bring out the subtlety of
the flavors and the natural crunch it provided. I had been experimenting with a couple of
different cake recipes and one of them was called Jose Maria’s Flourless Chocolate Cake.
It was a simple melt of chocolate with egg yolks, sugar and (shhhh) three tablespoons of
flour folded into melted chocolate and butter, followed by stiffly whipped egg whites. In
classic soufflé cake form, it rose during baking and then fell into a dense fudgy mass
upon removal from the oven. It was a match made in heaven. Just a thin slice of the
chocolate cake with a scoop of the cacao ice cream was the perfect combination.

It seemed I had created a monster and when Billy tasted it he brought a stream of guests
through the restaurant for tastes and with any luck, a full dinner followed by the “Life By
Chocolate” dessert. His moneymaking instincts kicked in and he wanted to know if I
could possibly manufacture enough of the ice cream to sell at the local feria to promote
his polvo de cacao sales. Other restaurants heard of it and I sold a batch of half quart
containers to my friend Tra at the Tucan Hotel. This was quickly followed with a sale to
the lovely Anja at Mercado la Roca who would put it on the menu as “Helado de Chef
David”. I was making the polvo de cacao everyday and had maxed out my production.
The drum of the ice cream maker needed to go back into the freezer for a minimum of
eight hours to make the best possible ice creams so it seemed, sadly, as if I was limited to
one run a day.

In addition to the chocolate I discovered another wonderful taste treat by using the small
local blackberries I bought from Roger at the Perez feria for my next “experimental” ice
cream. The Costa Rican blackberries grow on the sides of the mountains that surround
the farming valley of San Isidro and are tiny and quite tart. They also have an intensely
pure blackberry flavor, far truer that the fat (and pulpy by comparison) blackberries that I
was used to back in the States. They required a good run in the food processor to puree,
and then needed to be passed through a fine mesh screen to remove the seeds. The
resulting puree was tart and richly colored. I learned quickly just how fast a clean whilte
chef’s shirt and blackberries find each other.

I knew I wanted to temper the tartness and intensity of the blackberries slightly more than
my regular milk and cream base would for the ice cream, so I cooked a custard with milk
and egg yolks and added cream and the blackberry puree to that. The ice cream that this
marriage produced was rich, creamy, dense and both deeply flavored and colored. After I
made the first batch I wrote my sister and told her that it may have been one of the five
best things I’ve ever made. I try to temper my enthusiasm somewhat in describing my
creations to people, but this one was too good not to rave about.

While I did indeed serve it solo in a bowl, I decided that it too wanted an accompaniment
so I went for an old classic. Using a pound cake recipe that I had gleaned from the food
pages of the NY Times, I substituted the zest of our local mandarinas for their suggested
orange zest and that was IT. I cooked a simple fruit syrup of sugar and the mandarina
juice and poured it over the top as the cake came out of the oven to intensify the citrus
flavor. Not satisfied, I used the leftover blackberry puree to make a slightly sweetened
sauce and finally brought the three; blackberry ice cream, blackberry sauce and
mandarina pound cake, together. It was the perfect anti-chocolate dessert and I loved it.
Fortunately my guests did as well and the two desserts became my weekend offerings
when we finally opened The Gecko to the public. “One and one” was a typical dessert
order, but truth be told, I sell so much more of just the chocolate combination, It’s a hard
one to resist.

So I return to the US in July to find another Cuisinart ice cream make waiting for me at
my sister’s house in Austin. I need to gear up my production for the upcoming season
and I also need to expand my repertoire to include far more of the tropical flavors
available to me; guanabana (which I have made, and is a good one). coconut, guava and
more. Additionally a whole range of sorbets await me, including a fabulous recipe for
lemongrass/mango that I just found. I have created a monster.