Gelato

Several weeks ago I was watching Barefoot Contessa as I am wont to do waiting for PTI to come on and Ina Garten was making what she called Deeply Chocolate Gelato. It looked amazing. Even though I like hazelnut chocolates I thought that I would make it without and call it Double Chocolate Gelato.

I can see the difference between gelato and ice cream. Ice cream typically does not have the custard base made with egg yolks. But I'm not sure of the difference between gelato and frozen custard. We Cheeseheads LOVE our frozen custard (I miss Milwaukee).

Besides leaving out the hazelnut chocolates at the end I also opted to use up the ordinary Hershey's cocoa powder I had on hand rather than using a fancy expensive one as Ina calls out in her recipe. I also used a 3oz bar of dark chocolate rather than buying any bittersweet chocolate. It was just easier. I finely chopped and used the whole bar. The bar I bought was from Green & Black's and was 70% cocoa. Easily found at Ingles in the candy aisle. Whatever you do, do not use chips. Chips are coated with a release agent to keep them from sticking together. You don't want that in your gelato.

I found that I needed to strain the gelato twice. Once after I combined the cocoa and chocolate and again after I made the custard. I found that not all of the cocoa powder dissolved and some lumps were left behind. Maybe I only needed to strain the second time but I don't think it hurt to do it the first time. Besides I had some chocolate bar wrapper pieces I needed to strain out.

I was amazed that I didn't have any Kahlua in the house. I did have an OLD bottle of Starbucks coffee liqueur. I don't even know if they still make the stuff. I used what little I needed and threw the rest out. It wasn't Kahlua but the gelato came out great with the Starbucks.

The chilled gelato base is pretty thick. I put it in my Krups Automatic Ice-Cream Maker. This is one of those counter top units where you freeze the bowl a day in advance. Lickity split it was done, maybe 15 minutes.

The gelato was divine. It was so rich that after just six bites you have to consider that you've had enough. I think this gelato is as close to eating frozen fudge as you can get.

Snow in the Mountains

Today is a rare snowy day here in North Georgia. Rose decided to stay home with me since the everything closes if it snows around here. We ran around until she got cold.









Then... hot chocolate. I believe it was Rose's first hot chocolate.

She liked it.

Technically it was drinking chocolate, though I'm not sure of the difference. Some may remember the short lived Chantico at Starbucks. GOOOD stuff. Worth it? Well I guess it depends on how much your NEED for chocolate was at the time. And the more depressed you might be the better the deal. I have a case of Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate from the now defunct Great Tastes Of... (which will probably end up as Christmas gifts). My belief is that the fact that it didn't sell says something about this area. People who don't love chocolate can't be trusted. It's a genetic defect in my opinion.

I have wondered about cooking with it, possibly substituting it for cocoa. It is more than that, it has sugar, spices, a preservative or two I think, but I wonder if I could tweak a recipe to use it somehow, maybe add some extra punch to what would normally be just cocoa.