So you may already know that one of my favorite things is ice cream.  I won’t get into it here, but I could talk for hours about gelato and ice cream, and probably shed a tear or two for the absence of pistachio gelato made with pure Sicilian pistachio butter in my life.  But as I said, I won’t get into it here.

Anyhow, I have not been able to find really good ice cream in Cairo.  Shocker, right?  And I love to have ice cream in the freezer.  Things can be falling apart, but if I know there is ice cream in the freezer, somehow everything is okay.  I also love coffee — and I mean really good coffee — from Portland, also surprisingly unavailable here.  But since I brought a few bags of wonderfully aromatic, amazingly delightful Stumptown coffee, I decided to turn lemons into lemonade, or rather milk, eggs, sugar, and coffee into Stumptown coffee ice cream.   Oh my gosh, people.

Yeah.  I know.  My ice cream maker is all the way back in Portland.  I must be losing it.  But I found this website with a great tutorial on how to make ice cream without a machine, and the inspirational reminder that ice cream has been around a lot longer than electricity.  Needless to say, I was inspired.  We pretty much followed this recipe, but here is how we made it…

Equipment:

• French press or something for straining coffee grounds
• Double boiler
• Mixing bowl
• Mixer

Ingredients:

• 4 tbs ground Stumptown coffee
• 6 oz hot water
• 5 egg yolks
• 1 cup dark brown sugar
• 250 ml whipping cream
  
• 250 ml skim milk
• 2 cups whole milk

NOTE: the original recipe calls for 500 ml whole milk, but since we had a giant container of skim milk and a small container of whipping cream, and since we would not consume them otherwise, we used them thinking it would balance out in the end.  Somewhat logical, right?  Wrong.  It made the texture of the ice cream a little grainy, although it was still very good!  Next time I will stick to the recipe and use 500 ml whole milk instead.

First we prepared 4 tablespoons of ground coffee with 6 oz of hot water in our French press.  We let it steep for a good ten minutes while we prepared the rest of the ingredients.

We whisked together 5 egg yolks with 200 mg of dark brown sugar until it became thick and pale and added 250 ml of whipping cream and 250 ml of skim milk 500 ml of whole milk to the sugar mixture along with the coffee.  Using a double boiler, we cooked the mixture very slowly for a ridiculous amount of time until it thickened and coated the back of a wooden spoon.

Next we transferred the custard to a plastic bowl to chill in the fridge (in our case, overnight; but a few hours should do).  This morning I put the mixture in a larger bowl and put it in the freezer.  Every 30 minutes for about 3 or 4 hours (or until frozen), I removed the ice cream and gave it a good stir with an electric mixture to break up all of the ice crystals.

It sounds like a lot of time, I know, but I found it to be the perfect activity to accompany my busy schedule of getting caught up on NPR’s “This American Life” while cleaning house, catching up on laundry, and updating my resume.

In case the pyramids aren’t enough of a draw for you to come to Egypt, here are a few photos.

Mmm…