Chai Coconut Ice Cream

Cody is on day four hundred and fifty-nine of his sentence. He finished his sixth workshop piece this week and read me a draft on the Saturday visit. The piece is a short essay about Mr. Garcia at the auto-body shop — the man who hired Cody on Anthony’s word in September 2016 when Cody was seventeen and on bail and had nowhere else to work, who gave him a two-dollar raise after one month, who has held Cody’s position open for him for twenty-two months and counting and who sent Mama a card last Christmas that said, in his own handwriting, Mrs. Moreland, your son is going to be alright.

The essay is the kind of writing that makes a reader pay attention to a person they otherwise might not have noticed. Mr. Garcia is sixty-three. Mr. Garcia has been running the auto-body shop on Sheridan since 1996. Mr. Garcia hires guys with felony arrests because Mr. Garcia’s own brother served eighteen months in 1981 for a charge that, in Mr. Garcia’s telling at the workshop interview Cody had asked permission to use, was the kind of charge most people did not get a second chance from. Mr. Garcia decided as a young man that his shop was going to be a second chance for the people he met who needed one. He has done it for thirty years. The essay tells you all of that without telling you any of it directly. The essay tells you Mr. Garcia by showing you Mr. Garcia teaching Cody how to mix paint to match a 1998 Camry.

I do not know yet whether Cody is going to submit the essay to The Sun or to the Tulsa Review or to the chapbook addendum. I am not pushing.

The Tulsa Library teen writing program for me starts in six weeks. The acceptance letter from March is still on the fridge with a magnet. Marcus Wells is the program coordinator and is going to lead the first session on June sixth. The schedule for the next eight Wednesdays is going to be six-thirty to nine-thirty at the main library on Boulder, with a different published Tulsa author each week as the workshop leader. End of junior year is in seven weeks. AP exams are in five. The schedule is the schedule, and the cooking is going to keep being the part of the day that does not change.

And the recipe Sunday was chai coconut ice cream, because the weather hit eighty-two degrees on Wednesday and because Mrs. Henderson lent me her old electric ice cream maker the same afternoon. The maker is a small white-and-chrome appliance that has been in Mrs. Henderson’s basement since the 1990s. She brought it over in a tote bag at three-thirty Wednesday after Mama had mentioned to her at the mailbox that I had been wanting to make ice cream and could not justify the seventy-dollar cost of a new one. Mrs. Henderson said, when she pressed the maker into my hands the way she presses things into my hands, baby, you are going to need this for the summer. She was right.

The recipe is a Cookie and Kate one, the chai coconut ice cream Cookie has been running for years on the recipe roundup. Two cans of full-fat coconut milk steeped with the chai spices in a saucepan over medium-low heat for ten minutes — cardamom pods crushed, cinnamon stick, cloves, fresh ginger sliced, black peppercorns — until the spices have released into the coconut milk and the kitchen smells the way an Indian grandmother’s kitchen smells in the first hour of a Sunday-afternoon cook. You strain the spice-steeped milk through a fine mesh sieve. You whisk in a half cup of honey, a teaspoon of vanilla, a pinch of salt. You cool the base completely to room temperature on the counter, then chill in the fridge for two hours.

The churn is the magic step. You pour the chilled base into the ice cream maker’s frozen insert, you turn the machine on, and you watch through the small window in the lid as the base goes from a thin cream to a thickening cream to soft-serve consistency over twenty minutes. The motor makes the small steady whirring sound that vintage 1990s ice cream makers make. You scrape the soft-serve into a freezer container and freeze it for four more hours until firm.

The math: two cans of coconut milk $1.79 each, a half cup of honey from the bottle (about $0.40 worth), the chai spices from my spice rack (the cardamom from the lassi week is now well-used; the cinnamon and cloves have been on the rack for a year). Total: about $4.20 for a quart of ice cream that fed Mama and me for four small bowls Sunday night and Monday and Tuesday.

The technique I want to keep is the spice steep. Do not skip the ten minutes. The spices need that time to release into the coconut milk fat, and the steep is what separates a chai-flavored ice cream from a chai-spice-bomb ice cream. The strain through the sieve is also non-negotiable; nobody wants to bite into a whole peppercorn in their dessert.

Mama said, eating Sunday night, baby, this is the kind of dessert restaurants charge eight dollars a scoop for. The savings envelope is at $545. The summer is going to be the summer of borrowed ice cream makers and homemade pints and a brother who keeps writing about the people who carried him.

The recipe is below, the way Cookie and Kate wrote it. The trick I want you to keep is the spice steep — do not skip the ten minutes; the spices need the time to release into the coconut milk. Strain through a fine mesh sieve so nobody bites a peppercorn. Use full-fat coconut milk; light coconut milk freezes too hard. Make this in a borrowed ice cream maker if you have a neighbor like Mrs. Henderson, or in a cheap one off the back of an Aldi clearance shelf if not. The dessert is the upgrade.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 6 hours 15 minutes (includes freezing) | Servings: 8

Ingredients

2 cans (13.5 oz each) full-fat coconut cream, refrigerated overnight
1/2 cup sweetened condensed coconut milk (or regular sweetened condensed milk)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1 pinch fine sea salt

Instructions

Chill your equipment. Place a large mixing bowl and the beaters from your hand mixer (or the bowl of your stand mixer) in the freezer for 10 minutes before you begin. Cold equipment helps the coconut cream whip up properly.
Whip the coconut cream. Open the refrigerated cans of coconut cream and scoop out only the thick, solid cream into your chilled bowl, leaving behind any liquid. Beat on medium-high speed for 2—3 minutes until fluffy and soft peaks form.
Mix in the base. Add the sweetened condensed milk, vanilla extract, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves, allspice, and salt. Gently fold everything together with a rubber spatula until just combined — avoid overmixing so you keep as much air as possible in the cream.
Pour and smooth. Transfer the mixture into a standard 9x5 inch loaf pan. Smooth the top with the back of a spoon or an offset spatula. Cover tightly with plastic wrap, pressing it directly onto the surface of the ice cream to prevent ice crystals from forming.
Freeze. Place the pan in the freezer and freeze for at least 6 hours, or overnight, until completely firm throughout.
Scoop and serve. Remove the pan from the freezer and let it sit at room temperature for 5 minutes before scooping. Serve in bowls or cones. Sprinkle with a pinch of cinnamon or a drizzle of honey if you like.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chai Coconut Ice Cream — The First-Warm-Week Dessert from a Lent Ice Cream Maker