Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough

I was watering the garden one morning and noticed how strong the mint plant was going - so much so that it was starting to spill into other parts of the garden. It has been a while since I've made a mint ice cream, so I decided to use a handful or two of fresh mint for this creation. Because I also wanted to add a twist, I opted to incorporate some delectable cookie dough into the mix, providing a delightful crunch to complement the cool ice cream.

Rating: 4 scoops

The mint base in this ice cream was pretty good, but the cookie dough tasted more like toffee than cookie dough. When you want cookie dough, you want it to taste like a cookie instead of mostly sugar and chunks of chocolate. This was certainly a side effect of the cookie dough that I made - I wanted to try to make an egg-free cookie dough and to get it to hold together, you need to increase the binders - sugar, pecans, and chocolate in this case. I'd guess a true cookie dough (one with eggs and more flour) would put this creation at 5 scoops!

Ice cream made from fresh mint tastes completely different from the mint ice cream you typically find in the store or an ice cream shop. Commercial ice creams typically use peppermint flavoring, easier to access and use than fresh mint. Peppermint flavoring typically gets its taste from menthol compounds, which are often described as "spicy" and "sweet" at the same time. This is why commercial mint ice creams typically have a "cool" and sometimes "abrasive" flavor - you're tasting the large amounts of menthol compounds that are cooling down your mouth. In fresh mint ice cream (spearmint in this case with a hint of peppermint extract added in), the flavor is a lot "softer" - although still cold since it's frozen!

To make this ice cream, I boiled the dairy and glucose, cooked the sugar, and infused the mint for 30 minutes. Once I took the mint out, it was rapidly cooled to get it ready for the overnight cure.

For many people, it's not mint ice cream without it being green. Ice cream base is typically white, unless you're making a custard (in which case it would be yellow) or you have mixed something in that imparts color. The fresh mint infusion imparts no color, so I colored my base by using spirulina. There's not enough to taste it, but enough to color it the shade of green that everyone has come to expect.

After curing the base overnight, it was time to churn! Delicious!

To make the cookie dough, I melted butter and mixed it in with some sugar. From there, the rest of the ingredients were added. While delicious, the "cookie dough" was mostly chocolate pieces and pecans and didn't taste quite like the cookies I was looking for.