This ice cream is a worthy companion for any fall dessert like apple pie, pecan pie or cake. It's packed with the flavor of two vanilla beans which sets it apart from other vanilla ice creams. It's also a perfect base recipe for any ice cream- just forego adding one of the vanilla beans and customize this recipe with chocolate chunks, fruit, chopped cookies, caramel or anything else you have in mind. You have the choice of going soy free or nut free as well.
To achieve flaky baked items like pie crusts, it's all about how you mix the fat into the flour. the best crusts are baked with saturated fats which are solid at room temperature such as margarine or coconut oil. The fats are mixed into the flour so the mixture resembles gravel. In order to achieve this mixture, the fat pieces are about the size of peas. This allows the fat and water based ingredients to be layered in a grain-like structure when the dough is rolled. During baking, heat causes the water to expand into steam resulting in a flaky crust. A pastry blender is an essential tool for how you achieve this optimum mix of margarine to flour.
Of the spices used for baking perhaps none is as intriguing as vanilla. Catching a vanilla aroma outside of a bakeshop or kitchen can start an appetite out of thin air for sweets. Vanilla is sexy and mysterious. How does something so essential to desserts come from such a humble little pod?
Vanilla's rich history being cultivated started with the Totonac people in what is now modern day Mexico. Cortez eventually found the orchid pods along with chocoalte and brought them back to Spain and gave it the name vanilla which means "little pod".
Strudel is one of those treats that everyone loves. If I met someone who was anti-strudel I'd back away if I were you. Strudel has origins in Austria and Hungary dating back to the late seventeenth century. Traditional Austrian strudel is not made with phyllo dough or puff pastry but with a thin dough with a high gluten content that gives it elasticity. Traditionally, strudels can be filled with cherries, apples, spinach, saurerkraut or cheese. This variation features apples picked fresh from an apple orchard in Pennsylvania.
