Salted dulce-de-leche ice cream with bourbon

Just like there are perils in making a career of something you love, there is grave danger in making a hobby of something you have to do every day. Needless to say, as a typeface designer who runs a food blog on the side, I am prone to living dangerously. This is a matter that I hadn’t given much thought to recently until a friend of Amber’s who ate dinner with us a couple of weeks ago, voiced her surprise at the manner in which we described our cooking schedule.

In the year and half that we have lived together, our cooking has become more and more ambitious. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we cook more complicated recipes, but that we have become far more regular in cooking healthy meals every day. As things stand today, we try to eat four home-cooked meals each weekday—breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack and dinner. There are waivers for Friday nights when we eat out, and Friday mornings when I have a weekly meeting at 8:30 am. There are waivers also for Wednesday mornings, when we are invariably too tired to tumble out of bed early and cook breakfast. Weekends are free-style. It might sound like we have straitjacketed ourselves, but we are yet to find a solution that doesn’t require sound planning. Especially now that I am back to working full-time (and then some more), and Amber is taking on more responsibilities at work. Neither of us have much patience or ability left at the end of a long day at work to first decide what to eat and then cook it. To have a box of already chopped vegetables at hand or part of the meal pre-made and frozen makes those nights more easy than one could imagine. And that requires careful planning!

All of this is not to say that we don’t enjoy cooking like we used to when it was, well, just a hobby. Both of us love cooking and eating, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. It also the one thing that we do together almost every day. Cooking together gives us a chance to spend time with each other, and chat endlessly. And with our lives having become busier, that means so much more.

Today’s recipe is a really simple one. It is the dessert we served at the dinner that sparked this chain of thoughts. Based on Nigella Lawson’s no-churn ice-cream, we made a salted dulce-de-leche ice cream with a generous hint of bourbon, which we ate with home-made peanut brittle. The flavours of this ice-cream were reminiscent of my favourite flavour at our neighbourhood ice parlour. As soon as we are finished with the current batch and are ready for its decadent, richness one more time, I’m going to give it another shot with some tweaks. I think it could do with less bourbon and with some crushed brittle swirled into the ice-cream mixture before freezing. But till I do, it will be well-worth your time to try this one.

Salted dulce-de-leche ice cream with bourbon
Adapted from Nigella

1 400gm can of condensed milk
300ml cream
1–2 tsp sea salt flakes
1–3 tbsp bourbon

1. Bring a large pot of water to a gentle simmer and put inside it the unopened can of condensed milk. Make sure there is enough water to keep the whole can covered. Cover and simmer for 3–4 hours. Turn the heat off and when the water cools down, take the can out.

2. When it is cool enough to handle, open the can and scrape all the dulce de leche from it into a large mixing bowl. Add the cream and 1 tsp salt. Whisk until the mixture becomes smooth and thick.

3. Taste if the mixture is salty enough for you, and add more salt accordingly (Nigella points out that the flavors become muted once the ice-cream is frozen so bear that in mind).

4. Now add the bourbon, one-third at a time, whisking slowly and tasting as you go.

5. Transfer the mixture into a 1 litre air-tight container and freeze for at least 5 hours.