matcha flavoured lychee ice cream
Lately, there is a lot of pandemic and election related unrest in India. Fortunately for me, I live in an isolated bubble far from the maddening crowd and affairs of the country. At the moment, I can only order food on Amazon and buy ice cream and fried chicken from a highway outlet.
Last fall, I had bought a kilogram of ceremonial grade matcha from Arahataen Tea Farm, Shizuoka. There’s no way that I’d have been able to finish all of it even if I drank matcha every day. So one night, I decided to incorporate it in my brick of lychee ice-cream that I bought from the parlor.
Usually vanilla ice cream is used as the base as it is a safe but rather mainstream choice. However, in my opinion, lychee flavored ice cream with dried bits of lychee brings about an interesting character to the finished dessert, especially for those who can’t deal with too much ice cream sweetness. The matcha powder introduces a vegetal freshness to the otherwise somewhat saccharine lychee flavor. It’s quite perfect for my palate.
The steps are few and quite simple:
Take out the ice cream box from the freezer and let it sit in ambient temperature until the initial frost melts away.
Take out tablespoons of matcha (l love to overdose on matcha but you can regulate it as per your personal preference) and evenly spread it over the selected portion of ice cream. I like to convert my entire lychee ice cream into a matcha flavored ice cream.
Wet the ice cream scooper and start scooping up the ice cream and mashing it back until the matcha is blended perfectly. Alternately, you can keep it semi-blended for a marbled effect.
Freeze for a quarter of an hour.
Scoop out and serve in a bowl or put it in a crunchy waffle cone.
