Homemade butterscotch ice cream
8 oz dark muscovado sugar
3 1/2 oz butter
1 1/2 pints piping hot milk
4 egg yolks
Actions:
Put the milk on to heat up so that it is simmering in the background, not boiling.
Melt butter in to a decent, solid saucepan and put in the sugar, as lump free as possible.
It's well worth getting hold of a Delia Smith mini-whisk (they come in packs of two from Lakeland.co.uk) to help whisk the sugar in to the butter, and keep stirring the hell out of it as it begins to bubble. Let it bubble as long as you can possibly dare to make it caramelise (it's bloody difficult to tell because it's so dark, so the best way to do it is by smell really).
Start to gingerly pour in the milk. the first milk will splutter and erupt terribly, which is where the whisk comes into its own. You really need to whisk the thing fast and evenly, and start to pour in the rest of the milk either on a slow stream or in smallish increments. Once you've got approx a coffee mug of the toffee and milk whisked together you can pour a lot quicker. Taste with a teaspoon, and then say "Oh, my word". Put the lid on the pan, and leave to cool for a good hour. More if poss.
Whisk the four egg yolks in to a bowl (remember the set of two whisks? This is when you use the other one). When creamy looking, ever so gently start to pour in the lukewarm butterscotch milk. I tend to put it in using a table milk jug and pour it in along the inside edge of the bowl. Keep whisking and whisking to prevent premature-egg-cooking.
When your custard is completely mixed, put the bowl (or change to a heatproof one if you need to) over a simmering, not boiling saucepan of water. Whisk basically continually until when you put a spoon in to the custard, the mixture coats the back of it. If you've not done that before, make sure you put the spoon in before it starts to cook, so you know what it looks like when it *isn't* coating the spoon. It only takes ten or fifteen minutes, to be fair. Cool the custard, but keep coming back and giving it a whisk to prevent a skin forming. A different technique for that which I've not tried is apparently to put a circle of greasproof paper on the top of the custard.
What I tend to do is stick it in the fridge to go completely cold overnight, and make the ice cream the next day. Our ice cream maker is extremely weird, having been bought working, but borked, from Ebay for £5. So I switch the ice cream maker on for a while before we need it, so the drum is freezing cold, then I put the mixture in the bucket, put the bucket back in and voila. You need it to keep going for at least 25 minutes but basically check it out. If it's looking seriously granular in there, the job's done.
Stick it in a tub and in to the freezer pronto.
Given that this has no cream in it, it's really not too bad for you and OH GOD it do taste like heaven. Damned easy to do as well.
Please note - this will scoop straight from the freezer. Don't put it in the fridge beforehand.