July is National Ice Cream Month, as appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1984, there was no way we could let the month pass without something.. a whole month of somethings. That’s right, every food-based post for the entire month of July is going to be an ice cream or a sorbet. We figured sorbets were close enough to ice cream that we could get away with them! Is the weather hot where you are, we’ve certainly been needing frozen treats here in Texas, I’m still not acclimatised to the heat.

So, we’re starting the month off with a classic, kind of. Everyone knows mint choc chip ice cream, it’s a vivid green and a very fresh mint, peppermint usually, that icy mint flavour.

We grow mint in our garden, but we grow spearmint, it doesn’t have that icy “burn” it actually has more of a savoury flavour. But we decided it was worth a try. So during the custard making stage we infused the cream with mint, lots of mint. More mint than we could take off of our plant in one go, thankfully we regularly cull our herbs down so we had a jar of dried mint that was still homegrown.

I left it for a good long while, probably 30 minutes or so after having brought the cream up to a simmer and then turned it off. Once infused it got strained and the rest of the custard was made as usual. I was entertained to see that infusing the mint had turned the cream a pale green.. what you could indeed describe as a minty green (I’ve looked at too many paint charts).

While the custard was cooling I got my chocolate ready. I like a nice dark chocolate, but to satisfy slightly more than just me we settled on a semisweet, two bars of Ghirardelle. I turned them into small flakes with a potato peeler, slowly peeling each bar down, some of it came off in chunks, but they were still very small, despite what it looks like in the picture!

The ice cream got churned and the chocolate was folded in once it was done. Transferred to a container it was frozen completely.

The flavour of this ice cream threw some people off, the spearmint rather than peppermint as I said before is more savoury. This wasn’t bad, oh no, not at all, in fact it was very favourably received. Watching people eat it for the first time was entertaining, as they took a mouthful, had that “oh” moment, stopped to think about it…. and then ate the rest of the bowl and went in search of more.  I do believe the slightly bitter chocolate complemented the sweetness perfectly, the flakes making for a smoother texture, melting in your mouth and blending with the ice cream rather than having to crunch it.