Olive Oil Saffron Ice Cream

If you follow ice cream as much as I do, you have probably noticed a trend in ice cream over the past year – savory ice cream.  More and more chefs are getting creative and adding unexpected elements of flavor.  Some of the creativity is happening in ice cream shops while other ice cream experimentation is occurring in restaurants.  Apparently Heston Blumenthal serves a mustard ice cream on his menu!  Not sure about that one.

A few months ago, Food 52 and Jeni’s Ice Creams collaborated on an ice cream contest.  The winner would get their ice cream flavor made and sold in Jeni’s store.  Of course I entered, but sadly I didn’t win – can’t win them all.  The winning flavor just came out in Jeni’s stores.  When I saw the advertisement it reminded me that I wanted to try making the recipe myself, so I set about making this colorful and savory scoop the other day.

You can find the winning ice cream recipe for Olive Oil-Saffron Ice Cream with Burnt-Orange Caramel Swirl at the Food 52 website.  Here are a few notes from my experience making the ice cream:

1) Careful with the saffron.  When I was measuring the teaspoon of saffron, I smushed the saffron down into the teaspoon.  I think this resulted in me adding too much saffron to the base.  My ice cream was very yellow and the saffron flavor overpowered the swirl.  If you check out the pic of the Food 52 version, you will notice this is not the case.

2) Burn the sugar.  Well almost burn it.  I don’t think I let my caramel cook for long enough. As you may notice in my picture, it blended into the ice cream.  I think making the caramel darker would have added more flavor to the scoop.

3) Consider adding more orange flavor.  Although all of the liquid in the caramel is orange juice, when the caramel was cooked I felt it lacked a noticeable orange flavor.  Next time I would consider adding some orange zest or orange oil to the caramel.

Enjoy!