Strawberry Affo-Paco

Strawberry Ice cream straight from the Paco Jet.

Opening a new shop and trying to find the time to cram everything that you want to do into it is proving to be a challenge. Coffees need to be cupped, selected and approved for service. New baristas need to be sorted, interviewed, trailed and trained. Signature drinks are begging for development. Alternative beverages are screaming for attention. Makes me wonder how one is supposed to develop a menu?

It's summer and ice cream is on the mind. We have PacoJet. We have a hardening freezer. What we don't have is a service freezer. Turns out that I over-estimated one undercounter space and underestimated the depth of another refrigerator, leaving us with a space that's too small to fit the intended freezer. Screwed.

In-between scouring the internet for suitable workaround freezers, it's time to do something with the stacks of strawberry flats sitting in the lab. Strawberry ice cream and strawberry lemonade come to mind. Heck, come to think of it, how about strawberry lemon sorbet???

But first with the ice cream. Found a good starting point from The Cooking of Joy. No additives or stabilizers, just simple and natural ingredients.

One of the problems with doing multiple tasks is that you get distracted and instead of macerating the one pound of strawberries with 1/4 cup of sugar, I ended up macerating it with 395 grams of sugar - a bit too much...


Strawberry Affogato.

In the end, the mix was a bit on the sugary side and I think the excess sugar gave it what Ilenia describes as a "yogurt like" texture. For the next batch, I'll have to pay closer attention to the sugar.

As an affogato, the strawberry performed very well. It lended notes of butterscotch and candy to the Hines espresso. Burnt caramel and other pleasant notes rounded out the finish. That one might actually make the menu when we get the service freezer in place.