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Jun 09, 2015 Summer Camp By Jeremy Warmsley

Food, much like music, is a common and personal thread we all share. Our recurring guest feature I Can Cook, Too spotlights artist-submitted recipes and the stories behind them. This installment features a recipe from Summer Camp multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Warmsley. The London-based band also features Warmsley’s wife, vocalist Elizabeth Sankey. Bad Love, the band’s third album (not including their 2014 soundtrack to Beyond Clueless), is out now on Moshi Moshi. Bon appétit!

Jeremy from Summer Camp’s BROWN SUGAR SALTED CARAMEL ICE CREAM DREAM with BROWN SUGAR SALTED CARAMEL SAUCE in a SALTED CARAMEL WORLD of BROWN SUGAR SALT DREAMS

The sauce
300g brown sugar
150g butter
150ml double cream
Lots of fancy salt

The ice cream
150g granulated sugar (must be granulated for some reason)
100g soft brown sugar (for color)
350ml whole milk
725ml double cream
Just over half the aforementioned sauce

I loooooooove ice cream. However, for the entire life of Summer Camp thus far I’ve lived in a house with a kitchen so small that no freezer known to humankind was capable of fitting in it. Happily, this has recently changed, and we are now a band that owns a freezer.

Ahead of this momentous change, my bandmate/wife Elizabeth did some research and discovered a highly-rated, surprisingly affordable ice cream maker made by Cuisinart: the Ice30BCU. This is a superb ice cream maker that works very simply and, frankly, makes the best ice cream I’ve ever had. Better than the finest Italian gelato in Rome, better than Rita’s Frozen Custard, better than Laboratorio Gelato, better than London’s Gelupo (just), better even than (whisper it) Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream.

If you’re short of an ice cream maker, I have it on good authority that you can make perfectly good ice cream with just a freezer. Once you’ve finished your mixture, box it up and put it in the freezer. Take it out and smush a fork through it once every 15 minutes till it’s ice cream-like. (I’ve never done it this way so: not much help.) The trick, apparently, is to stop ice crystals from forming.

My ice cream base has a very simple recipe. I’ve tried various different recipes from books-Gelupo gelato uses milk, gelatine (!?), and no cream, and the incredible Ruby Violet uses eggs. But I find the best texture for this ice cream maker is just milk, cream, sugar, and whatever flavours you so desire. (Although it also makes excellent sorbet, which as it turns out is literally just water, sugar, and flavours, churned whilst freezing.)

First, you’ll need to make the caramel sauce. This will act as the main source of flavour in the ice cream, and you should make enough to have some left to drizzle on afterwards. Mine is based on The Guardian’s Perfect Caramel Salted Sauce (sidebar: The Guardian’s Perfect… series is brilliant; it’s the Metacritic of recipes), but I found their recipe wound up too watery.

Try not to think about just how much butter is going in.

Put 300g of brown sugar in a big ol’ heavy pan. Pour water on it just until all the sugar is wet. Give it a good slosh around. Set it over a medium flame. The sugar will melt away into the water, after somewhere between 7 and 14 minutes (it really depends on a host of factors, but it’s basically impossible to overdo this bit), you will be left with a thick syrup. Take off the heat and whisk in 150g of butter. (Cut the butter up into lots of small bits to make it easier.)

Mm… buttery.

Then pour in 150ml of thick double cream. The sauce should be getting very saucy at this point. It’ll firm up into a crunchy yet creamy sauce in the fridge. Give it a taste. See? Caramel. Add salt to taste. Personally, I think it’s hard to overdo the salt.

Pop that in a Tupperware (other brands are available) container and put it in the fridge. Next up: the ice cream. Very simple-use a hand mixer to combine 150g granulated sugar and 100g brown sugar with 330ml whole milk, in a large bowl. Add 650ml double cream and then pour in half the caramel sauce you just made. Put that in the fridge (covered so it doesn’t get onion-smelly or anything) and leave it a couple of hours so that the caramel sauce can be totally cold. (If I’m feeling particularly maverick I’ll just go for it with the ice cream maker without cooling the mixture first, which has always worked out fine thus far.)

You can tell this is exactly the right mixture for making ice cream with because it just tastes like melted ice cream. Sometimes I’m tempted to just drink this stuff neat, it’s incredible. But not as incredible as if you stick in the ice cream maker for half an hour and spoon a bit of the sauce on top.

That’s it! So easy, so tasty. Ice cream!

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