Rose Petal Ice Cream

This post is step 2 of the process of preparing ingredients for falooda. Step 1 was to make a rose syrup, and wind up with gulkand as a bonus by product. The remainder of the steps, including the process to make a naturally colored pink falooda sev and the process of assembling the drink, will appear in a post dedicated to the falooda itself. Though you may just want to eat this ice cream for itself, never mind the falooda!

Why do we expect rose-flavored things, be they milks or ices, to be some horrendously bright shade of pink? Google “rose ice cream” and you will almost find nothing else, and all of them artificially colored and flavored at best with rose waters of dubious provenance. Even the most well-intentioned folks will eventually resort to artificial food colorings for either syrups or the final ice creams.

The virtues of push-cart vendor or ice cream parlor desserts like the “cassata” are always much extoled but for me they were always hyper-sweet, a towering mélange of hyper-artificial flavors–and the hyper-colors? Well the colors didn’t interest me one bit, which is a funny thing to say because we in most parts of this country love, love, love those bright, almost exaggerated colorings on our buildings, on our clothes and in the most decadent of our enjoyments. Go to any Tamil quarter in Pondicherry, and you’ll see what I mean. We’ll do anything for those colors, even if it means we have to fool ourselves with additives to get them. They’re our artifice, maybe also our psychedelic fantasy.

But, as I know from interacting with so many people who live in these “mithai rangu” worlds, these things are distractions, externalities, superfluities. What matters is something much deeper within: the pure essence of rose is not, after all, its garish color but something far more delicate, difficult to catch, hidden within.

Actual rose ice creams will just never be bright pink because even the best rose syrups are not capable of delivering that much of a color punch when mixed with white milk and cream. A very suggestive, quite diaphanous light pink hue is the best I’ve ever managed, with petals added in for those flecks and hints of brighter shades.

So I didn’t try to catch the color and make my ice cream a gulabi pink that can be spotted a mile away because God-help-me that’s fake and because that doesn’t matter. Instead I focused on getting the fragrance and taste of rose into this ice cream and was surprised to find how simple it was and how well things like cardamom and vanilla bring out the taste of rose. In the end, you may not see the color of rose in your bowl, but you will taste it—and if you close your eyes just then, you’ll dream it.

Making Rose Petal Ice Cream

The hardest part of this recipe, as with the syrup that came before, is finding the roses. Ideally, you need paneer roses or some other red-to-dark-pink variety with that characteristic, heady fragrance. Since I’ve decided that color matters less in this recipe than it did for making rose syrup, tea roses or others from some lovingly tended bower would also work beautifully. The famed damask roses [Rosa Damascena] from Kannauj which is historically an attar-manufacturing region or from Pushkar, or paneer roses known in Tamil parts for their legendary fragrance, would be among the best to work with. If you must find a rose essence or water, a gulab ki rooh, get it from those places.

In Tamil Nadu, my choices are more limited: these are not rose-growing regions really. Besides, there’s some uncertainty about which, exactly, is the paneer rose. The market vendors insist that it’s the gulabi pink rose you see pictured in this post and below, too; the stuff used in most temple garlands and floral offerings. Most likely, it’s Gruß an Teplitz. But the ladies at home insist just as forcefully that paneer rose is light pink, with a blossom that lasts barely a day and petals that fall very easily off once the bloom is spent. The two roses pictured above are the essence of this controversy: the dark pink blossoms (on the left) from a neighbor’s garden and the light pink one (on the right) from a bush I found at a local nursery. Sadly for me, the light pink one had none of the fabled fragrance, so I was left working with what I could find in the flower market which really was not bad at all.

Roses in hand, the process of making this ice cream comes down to just three big steps: flavor the milk, thicken the milk, churn the ice cream.

This recipe is written for those of us in places where whipping cream is scarcely available–and since condensed milk additions really interfere with taste, I’ve chosen a method that starts with 1.5 litres of whole fat milk, flavors half, thickens and sweetens the other half, adds some extra half-and-half (Amul fresh cream types), and then turns to the churn.

The milk gets flavored via an infusion of rose, shall we call it? It’s basically rose petals steeping in hot milk, then being squeezed for every last drop of color. The heat of the milk destroys the color of the petals, so it’s important not to cook them, just to steep. What color is left needs to be squeezed out by hand–as I say, every last drop.

I then blitzed those very petals and added them back into the milk. Their residual flecks of pink are quite attractive in the final ice cream.

Heat destroys rose scents, too, leaving only the mildest of fragrances behind. This gets buttressed with cardamom and the scraped seeds of a whole vanilla bean–this is important, so do not leave it out. But do marvel at just how well some good cardamom and vanilla can put you in mind of rose. Adding a little rose syrup helps, but at this stage the flavored cream doesn’t really need it.

Some fresh rose petals, shredded, and some finely chopped pistachios also work wonders to evoke rose. For ultimately that’s all an ice cream can do–evoke rose, bring out the scent and taste of rose like the rushing memory of a precious lost world, or the yearning for its restoration.

This is that longing; this is that sort of ice cream.

Churning and Yearning

This isn’t a no-churn ice cream. I’d venture that there is no such thing as a no-churn ice cream, because churning is what incorporates air and makes a heavy cream light and airy. The increase in volume is called an overrun, and there’s a science to seeking it and controlling it which we’re not so worried about in this recipe, but some overrun is needed for the right texture.

A combination of quick chilling interrupted by an almost relentless churning encourages the water in the ice cream to form many tiny “seed” crystals instead of clumping into more discernible icicles. So it’s logical, the tinier the crystals, the smoother and creamier the ice cream. Churning keeps the crystals in motion so they don’t have a chance to grow into clusters before freezing stops all their motion. All this makes for the mouth-feel of a good ice cream. All those no-churn recipes out there using cream and (God help me) condensed milk aren’t attempting this; they’re just swapping out ice cream for frozen cream, which it’s really, really not.

So, you do need a churn for this one, or you need to roll up your sleeves and just be the churn. Be the churn you wish to see? [Gandhi didn’t say that any more than he talked about “being the change,” by the way. Whoever made that up probably also made up no-churn ice cream.]

Roll up your sleeves and make trips to the freezer every few hours to rapidly mix your slowly freezing ice cream. Break up the crystals as best you can, and beat in air. Using a hand-mixer on low speed works. It’s a good idea to keep the whisks chilled, too, while you’re doing this.

On that lovely note, I’ll leave you to the search for the best scented roses, flavoring your milks with them, and churning your deepest longings into this most ethereal of ice creams.

Rose Petal Ice Cream

Scented with real roses and made from their petals, this is no artificially colored bright pink ice cream but one that is as elegant as the roses that give it its character. Roses are known for their cooling properties, so enjoy this as an extra special summer treat, or use it to top a falooda.

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Ingredients

  

• 1.5 litres of whole fat milk
• 1 generous handful of good quality, organic, fragrant red-pink rose petals
• 1 ½ cups sugar, plus 2 tablespoons
• 2 cardamom pods, seeds removed and powdered
• 1 whole vanilla bean, scraped for its seeds
• 2-3 tablespoons rose syrup (from my prior post)
• 1 cup fresh cream
• 2-3 tablespoons chopped pistachios and almonds (optional)

Instructions

 

• Bring the milk to a boil in a heavy-bottomed pan, leave a wooden spoon in it to keep it from boiling over, and allow it to thicken for about 15 minutes.
• Then pour out about 2 cups of the milk, leaving the rest simmering and thickening further on the stove on medium heat and with a wooden spoon still left in.
• Into this hot milk, drop in the rose petals. They will wilt and turn from a dark to a light pink almost instantly. Leave them there for a half hour or so. Then strain them out and work with your hands to squeeze both color and taste from the (virtually cooked) rose petals into the milk itself.
• Don’t throw away the used petals. Blitz them with 2 Tablespoons of sugar in a food processor or mixie jar, and add this back into the now-cooling milk. Set aside.
• Meanwhile, scrape down the sides of the the milk left simmering on the stove. Once it has reduced by about half in volume, add 1 1/2 cups of sugar and mix until dissolved. The mixture will look watery, so keep cooking it, stirring once in a while to ensure it doesn’t catch at the bottom of the pan. Allow it to cook until it thickens again.
• Now switch off the flame and let this thickened milk cool. Add the rose-flavored milk, powdered cardamom, and the scraped seeds of 1 whole vanilla bean. Vanilla essence can be a substitute if you have no bean, but make sure it’s the real stuff and not imitation.
• Then add a cup of fresh cream or half-and-half. You’re left with a combination of 2 cups rose flavored milk, a cup of cream, and as much as you have of the thickened milk. Allow this to cool completely and chill, preferably overnight.
• Transfer the milk-cream mixture to the bowl of an ice cream maker and churn according to the instructions given. This will give you a soft scoop ice cream, which then needs freezing once again until it’s ready to scoop out (also overnight).
• If you don't have an ice cream maker, freeze the rose mixture 2 hours, then remove and beat it well. Use a hand mixer on a low speed setting if you have one, taking care to keep the whisk attachment parts chilled also between beatings. Repeat this cycle of freezing and beating/mixing/churning 4-5 times; that will bring you to a soft scoop stage. Freeze again until the ice cream is firm enough to scoop (overnight).
• If you’re using nuts, then mix those in at the soft scoop stage, before the final overnight freezing.