Sourdough Ice Cream

I have been cultivating a sourdough starter for a few days now, and every reference that I can find recommends throwing away a large portion of the starter.  Depending on the recipe, after a few days of feeding, only a small percentage of the original culture continues to be fed.  Some recipes even do this several times, in an effort to get a more pure yeast and bacterial culture.
Well I wasn't about to follow this seemingly standard procedure(I understand why people do it, but anything is better than food in the garbage). Instead of throwing away the extra culture I decided to bake it and make something out of it.  That lead me to sourdough ice cream.

You can see in this picture how little of the culture continues to be fed, leaving the rest to be thrown away and die; I still killed it, but then I ate it.



The culture is equal parts, by weight, whole grain wheat flour and water. That's it. I added a little bread flour, just enough so that it started it look like more of a dough than a batter. The ratio here is not very important. I then poured this into a pan and covered it for 24 hours.

The next day I baked it at 325F for 1 hour and achieved a very dense and sour loaf. Not great for sandwiches.

Now that you have the sourdough, here is how to make it into ice cream.

Remove the loaf from the baking pan and cut it into slices, the thinner the better. Bake at 250F until it is very dry. Blend in a blender until the slices are a fine powder.

Base Recipe:
200g cream
60g honey
15g sucrose
35g sourdough powder
1 pinch of salt
Keep Separate: 36g cream, 25 g buttermilk, 9g agave syrup, 4g amaro
Method:
Place the cream, honey, sucrose, salt, and sourdough into a pot and bring to a boil while whisking. Pass through a fine chinoise, and the add reserve the cream, buttermilk, agave, and amarro.
This is what didn't go through the chinoise, it was tasty, very 2nd century Greece, I ate it for dessert! -->


Place everything into the fridge and let it get as cold as your fridge will allow. Pour the chilled base into your ice cream machine and churn until it looks right. You could just follow the instructions from the manufacturer?

Plate it up!

Sourdough ice cream with candied pecans and sourdough dust

This specific combination is a little too intense to be a pre-dessert or a dessert amuse, but if I added a few more components I think it would make a great main dessert. The pecans have aleppo pepper in the spice mix, so there is a nice contrast between creamy/cold and crunchy/spicy.

I have to warn that there is a little bit of texture in the finished ice cream, due to the fact that I blended the bread into such fine particles(they went through the chinoise), but with the pecans and the dust on the plate, I thought the texture was awesome.  There are no eggs in this ice cream, and the only stabilizer is the bread itself, which is also doing the flavoring.  I thought this was a cool idea, which is why I blended the bread so fine. Of course, the sugar helps with the finished texture as well.

I may try and make a more refined version. The bread would be left out to dry at room temperature for a few days(no browning flavors), left in big pieces(purely smooth texture), and cornstarch(or another pure starch) would be added to bind the water.  This would just be a less "rustic", version of the same ice cream. That verison may not be as cool though because you have to add another starch other than the bread, or maybe that makes it more cool? I can never tell.

I hope you are doing well,
Adam