palm sugar banana pecan ice cream

I have been in love with this new book, baked, by the owners, Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafit, of baked bakery in Brooklyn. Next time I'm in New York, which could be a long time from now, I will definitely visit their bakery. I have tried many of their recipes and I love ALL of it. It's the most used book in our baking kitchen right now. I trust them completely.

I'm not a baker, never been one. I bake occasionally here and there but never got into it until now. Our new expansion at Thai Fresh has in house bakery where we just make different things all the time. Just like our deli case, you never know what you will find in our bakery case. It's more fun that way. We also play a lot with ingredients that are found locally.



Pecan just went out of season. I'm sure you can still get Texas pecan everywhere but the pecan vendor at the market had their last market day last weekend and brought us a box of pecans at the end of the market. He suggested we freeze our pecans to help keep them fresh to use later in the year. I have made pecan pies from this same book.

I adapted this recipe from Baked book and came up with something a little more Thai. This is to date my favorite ice cream that we make at Thai Fresh.

I substitute their piloncillo which is Mexican sugar with palm sugar. Piloncillo is made from crushing the juice from sugar cane. The juice is boiled down and then poured into molds. The juice will harden into blocks. Palm sugar is derived from collecting nectar from sugar palm flowers. The nectar is boiled and then poured into jars or molds. Palm sugar that are found in the US are mostly coconut sugar which is made from saps of coconut flowers. There is very little processing that goes into making palm sugar. Palm sugar is used a lot in Thai desserts and to sweeten curries and other dishes. My mom likes to use both palm sugar and white sugar to season her dishes.

I also substitute heavy cream with coconut cream to make this ice cream dairy free. Coconut cream is the first squeeze when you make coconut milk from shredded coconut meat. If you can't find coconut cream in cans, use the top part of coconut milk (before shaking) and use the bottom to make soup or curries. When making desserts, only coconut cream is used.

I never just make this one little batch, I usually triple or quadruple it. I also reduce the amount of bananas used and it turned out to be great. If reducing the amount of bananas, try reducing the amount of sugar or increase the amount of coconut cream to make up for it.

palm sugar pecan ice cream
makes one quart

1 cinnamon stick
3/4 cup palm sugar
8 very ripe bananas
1/2 cup coconut cream
1/2 cup chopped toasted pecans

In a small sauce pan, combine 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon of water adn cinnamon stick. Simmer until fragrant about 3 minutes. Add palm sugar and stir until dissolved. Take off the heat and let cool to room temperature.



Chopped frozen bananas and set aside. Remove cinnamon stick and pour the syrup into a blender, add coconut cream and bananas and blend until smooth.

Freeze in your ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions. Add pecan a few minutes before the ice cream is done.

(you can freeze the bananas before hand to reduce the time in the ice cream maker)