TracyFood

Oregon Snow 15 January 2007 11:01 pm

Posted by Tracy in : coconut, cooking, dessert, recipes, restaurants, sorbet, vegan , trackback

I miss many things about The LocoMotive, and one of them is a luscious coconut-lime sorbet called Oregon Snow. This awesome vegan dessert was one of the few permanent fixtures on their ever-changing menu, along with the restaurant’s signature dish of sautéed portobello mushrooms in red wine sauce, and a simple house salad: mixed greens vinaigrette. (Sounds like a pretty good meal read in reverse, but I digress.) It snowed here in Eugene last week, just a few days after I posted my reminiscences about The LocoMotive, and tonight I finally got up the nerve to attempt their wonderful sweet-tart-creamy (and did I mention vegan!) frozen dessert. Peter and I got our ice cream maker last May (my parents are developing a habit of getting me the kitchen appliances they secretly covet but fear they’ll never use themselves, oh darn) and it’s worked wonders on our dairy consumption, but so far we haven’t made many sorbets. Tonight’s experiment suggests that we have much delicious work to do in this area.

I used:

1 14-oz can Thai Kitchen organic coconut milk (full fat, not light)
1/4 cup sugar
3 TB lime juice

Good ice creams (and gelati) start with good custards, and Graham, one of my former coworkers at Sundance, once pointed out to me that coconut milk is basically a custard already, so I decided to keep things as simple as possible on this first attempt. Because coconut milk is sweet on its own, I used very little sugar (more on that in a bit). I heated the ingredients together in a saucepan over medium-low just long enough to dissolve the sugar and melt the coconut fat to give one smooth consistency. Then I cooled the mixture in the fridge for half an hour (I kept checking on it because I was afraid the coconut fat would solidify and separate out) and put it in the ice cream maker for about 40 minutes to produce a nice solid mass.

The result was three servings of rich, creamy, not-too-sweet goodness. If anything, it was too creamy to call a sorbet. Peter says I could probably double both the sugar and the lime juice, which would bring me up to just over two cups of liquid to a half-cup of sugar, or a little over 4:1. According to The Best Recipe, the role of sugar in frozen desserts is structural as well as flavorful — by physically blocking the formation of large ice crystals, it keeps the dessert’s texture smooth. It also effectively lowers the freezing temperature of whatever mixture forms the base of the dessert, so it takes longer to freeze, and in that time more air gets blended in by the ice cream machine, with a lighter, fluffier dessert as a result. Yum. My only concern is that maybe more lime juice, desperately needed to counter the sweetness of more sugar, will make the “custard” too watery, resulting in bigger ice crystals and a grainier texture (I ruled out making a simple sugar syrup in part for this reason as well as my primary goal of keeping things simple) but since this first experiment made such creamy goodness I think I’ve got quite a bit of leeway to play with the balance of flavor and texture and awesomeness. Tune in later for more results!