ice cream

Hay nieves!

May 23, 2012 by Lesley Tellez

It’s been hot in Mexico City lately, which means it’s the best time to buy nieves, or street-side ice cream or sorbet. A few days ago I found probably the best nieve I’ve never tasted, from a guy named Benny (that’s him under the hat) who set up on calle Ramón Corona just a short walk from Circunvalación. The street is just west of Mercado La Merced on the way to the Zócalo.

Benny’s helper, a young man, shouted “Hay nieveeees! Dulce de leche, mamey, limón!”

The sun shone high and bright. We wandered over. Benny lifted the aluminum lid and a creamy lagoon of orangey-peach mamey lay there, waiting to be scooped. It was the slightest bit runny, like freshly churned ice cream. My friend Ben and I split one order of dulce de leche and mamey, and I think I might’ve moaned on the sidewalk.

Benny says he makes the ice creams himself using fresh fruit and ingredients. He also takes special orders for birthday parties. His minimum is one bote — the size pictured above — which feeds about 300 people.

If you don’t have any weddings or baptisms coming up, you should seek him out for a scoop. He takes his cart along Ramón Corona, Mesónes and Pino Suárez, and he says he works year-round. He doesn’t venture onto the more touristic side of the Zócalo, where street vendors aren’t allowed. Here’s a handy map of where I found him below.

Cuban ice cream, Mexican charm at Mercado Medellín

March 18, 2011 by Lesley Tellez

Photo by Martin de la Torre

I met the Cuban ice cream guy the same way he meets all his ladies: he called out to me when I was passing by.

“Would you like to try some Cuban ice cream, without the promise to buy?”

He was a smiling man in an apron, standing behind a row of coffee machines and freezers. Without the promise to buy? I guess I had a few minutes.

He opened a freezer and emerged with a pale yellow dollop on a plastic spoon. “Helado de nata,” he announced. “People who try it don’t let it go.”

He was right. The ice cream was creamy, mild. Fresh-tasting. Like homemade whipped cream.

Since then I’ve continued to stop by his stand whenever I’m at Mercado Medellín — it’s located along the northern wall, near the hallway entrance to the fondas. His flavors are consistently good. And they aren’t what everyone else carries: date and cranberry are on his long list, in addition to caramel, almond, raspberry and orange.

It’s fun to sit at the counter on a plastic stool and take in the scene. He likes to call out to couples strolling through the market. “Helados para los enamorados?” (Ice cream for the lovers?) Or to women walking alone, in a hurry: “Quiere probar los helados Cubanos, sin compromiso?” (Do you want to try Cuban ice cream, without promise to buy?) He talks to men, too. A lot of people stop.

Finally, after months of knowing him only as the Cuban ice cream guy and recommending his stand that way to my friends, I stopped by last week for a malted milkshake and asked him his real name. My friend Martin came with me.

Turns out his name is Eugenio Palmeiro Ríos. He’s a cousin to Rafael. And guess what else? He used to be a chemical engineer in Cuba.

Now it all makes sense. Only a chemical engineer could make ice cream this good.

Palmeiro’s ice creams are made with real cream, fresh fruit and sugar. He doesn’t use artificial flavors or chemicals. He also sells Cuban-style coffees, milkshakes, malts, homemade yogurt, brownies, muffins and flan.

He got into ice cream as a hobby about five years ago, while he was working days in a molecular biology lab. He still keeps is original counter-top ice cream makers in back, although his current production dwarfs their size. The two machines he uses today make 60 liters per hour.

I asked him whether ice cream vendors in Cuba tended to be talkative, and he said no. He learned the art of customer persuasion in Mexico.

If you’re ever in the neighborhood, his stand is worth a visit. Mercado Medellín is located in the Colonia Roma, at Campeche and Medellín streets.

”Photo

Photo by Martin de la Torre

My malted milkshake, flavored with Colombian fruit I think called caruba

The Cuban ice cream guy himself

Mamey ice cream

November 23, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

After lunch on Saturday, Crayton and I went on a stroll through Plaza Rio de Janeiro in the Roma neighborhood. An ice cream vendor there caught my eye: she sat under a little tarp, with her metal ice cream cylinders wedged inside ice-packed buckets. Her flavors had been written in a whimsical font. One was fig with mezcal.

“Oooh, fig with mezcal!” I told Crayton.

“Do you want one?”

At this point we’d already walked by the place. “Well… no,” I said. “I shouldn’t.”

We’d just eat lunch. Which had included bacon.

“Are you sure?”

It’s truly astonishing how many times Crayton knows me better than I know me. I did want one, so we went back and I tasted the fig, which ended up being too sweet. But she also had mamey, a popular flavor in Mexico. Unbelievably, despite my mamey obsession, I hadn’t tried mamey ice cream yet. So I got one scoop.

I can’t even describe to you how good it was. It was kind of pumpkiny, and melon-y, and I think I detected some cinnamon. This morning I woke up thinking about it. And then I thought: I need to have an ice cream tasting party. I will gather all my ice-cream loving friends, make an ice-cream themed music mix, and then churn up three Mexican-inspired ice creams that I’ve been dreaming of lately: mamey, crema and piloncillo. We will have mamey splits, like a banana split, but better. We’ll cover our scoops with pumpkin seeds instead of walnuts. We’ll drink Kahlua-spiked coffee. (Which isn’t ice cream-ish, but fun nonetheless.)

This is going to happen. Stay tuned.

Roasted peach ice cream with manzano-chile infused caramel sauce

July 24, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

A few weeks ago, I was strolling around Mercado San Juan when I spied some white, donut-shaped peaches at a back stall.

“Can I have a taste of these?” I asked the woman.

She grabbed one and cut off a thick slice. One bite — one juicy, sweet, summery bite — and I was sold. I bought a kilo.

I had a vague idea to make ice cream, but when I got home and started googling, I realized I’d just barely hit the tip of the iceberg. I could make roasted peach ice cream. With caramel sauce. But not just any caramel sauce. Chili-infused caramel sauce.

[Pause for “Ooooooooh” moment.]

The spicy caramel sauce idea wasn’t mine. Food, She Thought, an LA-based food blogger, had gushed recently about a habanero-caramel sauce sundae she’d tried at a fair, and then successfully made at home. Roasted peaches would go perfectly with that. Right?

And so. A few weeks ago, I cut up my peaches and doused them in agave honey. Then I arranged them like fat little snails on a baking sheet….

And then I roasted ’em….

And I snuck in a few bites of peaches, and they were so fabulous, I almost wanted to cry. But no. Must not eat more. Must put them in the ice cream.

Into the cream they went. By then I’d done so much work, I was ready to eat the damn thing already. Forgot to mention, my recipe called for peach preserves, but my local Mexican supermarket doesn’t carry them. So I whipped up a quick batch by hand. Yes, I’m insane.

After pouring my ice cream into an old yogurt container, which I keep for just these types of purposes, I got up the next morning and tasted it.

And it was… okay. Not spectacular. But good for a weeknight. (If I was the type of girl who ate ice cream on a weeknight — usually I prefer dark chocolate.)

The deal was, the ice cream needed more depth. I didn’t use any eggs — I was “experimenting” — and it was just too milky and creamy. Plus, despite me roasting the peaches, it lacked in-your-face peach flavor. Maybe I should have used more. Or maybe I should have added more homemade peach preserves. In any case, next time I’m going to use Dorie Greenspan’s recipe, which calls for pureeing peaches and adding it directly to the custard. And I’m going to try out peach liqueur. Wish they sold fifths of that… I can’t see myself drinking peach liqueur, ever.

Feeling kind of lukewarm about the peaches, I made the caramel sauce a few days later. And for my very first caramel sauce, it was great. Luscious and pretty and creamy. (The secret: Don’t stir it. EVER.) Per Food She Thought’s instructions, I sliced up some manzano chilies (couldn’t find habanero) and added them to boiling water. Then I added that water to the sugar, which eventually became caramel.

The sauce was spicy, but in a strange way. Like, three minutes after you started eating, a slow burn developed, somewhere in the back of your throat. I wanted more fire up front — something to contrast immediately with the sweetness of the peaches.

I’m still researching this — maybe I should try adding chili oil at the end, instead of spicy water at the beginning? Because my next stop is chili-infused cajeta. Morita-chili infused cajeta.

Meanwhile, my jar of spicy caramel is still sitting in the fridge. I’m thinking about drizzling it on apples. The ice cream just isn’t good enough.

Recipes below, if you’re interested.
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Homemade mamey frozen yogurt

May 20, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

A lot of my culinary adventures lately have started with a rotting mamey. This one I’d been suckered into buying on Sunday at the tianguis. (Where, it must be remembered, I was hungry.)

I accepted a particularly juicy chunk from a vendor and thought, Well… maybe I can slice this up and have it for dessert. But when I got home, and over the next few days, I noshed instead on some dark chocolate Hershey kisses, a bag of American candy from Alice’s house and leftover banana pudding.

The mamey sat on the bottom shelf of my fridge, in the very back. It began turning brown at the edges.

Not wanting my poor mamey to die, and wanting my jeans to continue to fit me, I tried to think of something light I could whip up with it. Obviously not ice cream. But maybe… fro-yo?

A quick google search turned up a David Lebovitz recipe on 101 Cookbooks. It called for straining yogurt with a cheesecloth. (Ugh. Too lazy.) But that led me to David’s even simpler recipe on his own site, which called for basically dumping yogurt and sugar together, and then churning it in your ice cream maker.

I could do that. I could do that in, like, an hour.

So I cut up my mamey and mashed it with a fork, and added a few healthy squirts of agave nectar. (Did I forget to mention that I didn’t add any processed sugar to this?) I added some Activia yogurt I had in the fridge. I chilled it for an hour, and clumsily poured it into my ice cream maker, getting mamey-agave-yogurt stuff all over the front and sides of my mixer.

Twenty-five minutes later, it was done. And it was good.

Not out-of-this world spectacular — the texture isn’t as smooth and creamy as what you’d get at the store, and next time I think I’d add more yogurt (or lime juice?) to boost the yogurt-y tang. But it’s a fine first start. Definitely something I could snack on after dinner, or outside on our porch on a sunny day.

Plus, this opens up a whole new world of fro-yo. I’ve seen lychees at the market lately…. hmmm…..

Recipe after the jump, if you want it.
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Apple brown betty and homemade cinnamon ice cream

May 6, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

So, um, those cinnamon rolls…

They didn’t turn out very well. The flavor was fine. (Well, okay, I could have added more butter.) But they didn’t rise. And they were hard. Even with the cream cheese frosting…. it was like biting into a cinna-frisbee. Bleh. Maybe I boasted too much about kicking the dough’s butt?

So. With a bowl of cream cheeese frosting in the fridge, I probably should have made a quick bread or something and used up the leftovers. But no. I needed dessert redemption. I had to make something else, something that was not a bread. Something that had lots of butter and sugar and required little work. Something with the name “Betty” in the title.

Seriously: How cute is the name Apple Brown Betty? Even before the Cinnamon Roll Disaster of 2009, I’ve been wanting to make some. My friend Jesica was entranced, too, so today she came over, we cued up The Pioneer Woman and got to work.

Apple Brown Betty is basically a gooey, buttery, sweet apple casserole, with bread crumbs holding everything together. Pioneer Woman’s recipe called for cubes of wheat bread, but if I make it again, I’d probably use white breadcrumbs. Something about little chunks of wheat bread didn’t sit well with me.

None of that even matters, though, because the best part was the two scoops of love on top: Homemade cinnamon ice cream, y’all. (Insert swoon.) My mom got me the ice-cream-maker attachment for my KitchenAid mixer before I left for Mexico, and I finally unpacked it and put it to use. It was actually amazingly easy: Cook the batter (and ignore the massive amounts of heavy cream); chill it overnight; then pour it into the frozen mixer bowl and watch it churn. Thirty minutes later, done.

And when we stuck our spoons into the ice cream bowl…. man. Oh man. This was creamy, delicate stuff, whispering of cinnamon. Jesica even admitted that she wasn’t even that excited about cinnamon ice cream in the first place, but this stuff — it kind of socked you upside the head, you know? In a good way.

I promise, my dessert spree is over for the next few days. I’m dreaming of mamey ice cream, but I’m going to log 5 hours at the gym before I do it. The gyms re-open tomorrow, yay!