Parsley ice cream by Bruno Tenailleau

When we talk about flavours and aromas, it is important to make 2 distinctions:
- firstly, how do you get the desired flavour
- and then, how do you make those flavours accessible to the nose and taste buds.
To this end, ice cream is particularly interesting, and nothing should force us to keep if for desserts.

Parsley ice cream
When cooking, we eliminate some tastes and bring out others. For parsley, I plunge my washed bunches into salted boiling water for 45 seconds to 1 minute and cool them down suddenly in ice water. This immediately stops the cooking: the flavours remain, but the grassy notes are gone. The parsley becomes tender. To extract these flavours, we chop it finely to get a purée. You can use a hand blender or a slow juicer for this. If this is the case, keep some dry matter for the purée. The little pieces of leaves will give the ice cream a nicely speckled appearance. Your base is ready. Now incorporate it to a lightly sweetened 4vanilla cream and use a turbine.

Why ice cream?
Parsley is first and foremost used for its aromas! Once in the mouth, the aromas are soon lost and as the leaf is hard to chew, we tend to swallow it without extracting its essence. By lighly cooking and grinding the leaves, we resolve part of this problem, but not the question of perfume. Hence the ice cream… the cold and the multitude of tiny air bubbles that it contains imprison the scents. Ice cream smells of nothing, but once it is in the mouth, when it begins to melt, the fragrance is released and we notice the perfumes. As the ice cream does not melt instantly, you will also obtain a long aftertaste.

What does it go with?
A stew with mushrooms, for example, but also white meat and duck whose strong grilling scents can be too brutal. To highlight the meat, it is preferable to sweeten it and perfume these strong aromas. This is why sweet and sour blends are interesting