Results - Roast Peaches with Hoegaarden Ice Cream

For the first time making beer Ice cream, I'm pretty proud of myself. I'm also pretty happy with the fact that the ice cream turned out pretty smooth and fluffy, even thought I don't own or had access to an ice cream machine. You can see a photo of the creation below.

Roast Peaches with Hoegaarden Ice Cream

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Like I said in my earlier post, we had a tray of beautifully fresh and fragrant peaches. After caramelising the sugar and then adding them, they created an intense aroma that made me want to fish them straight out of the pan even before they had entered the oven.

Fresh Peaches from Uralla

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The recipe called for Hoegaarden beer, but at the moment I'm in country NSW, and all the ingredients I require weren't quite available. Instead of using Hoegaarden, I used Haagen. Haagen is an Australian beer which is brewed in traditional German style. It made for a very beer-y ice cream, and I assume that is the whole point of the ice cream flavour. I'm sure that Hoegaarden can be substituted for any type of beer...pick your favourite and off you go. After tasting it, I immediately thought of Beez Neez, the honey flavour in the beer would make the ice cream take on a slight beer/honey flavour. I also had to leave out the peach schnapps, I could find every other type of schnapps but not peach. I'm one to follow these recipes as closely as possible, considering what the whole point of this exercise is, but in the end the flavour of the peach and caramel was too perfect that I think the schnapps may have ruined it.

Haagen Beer

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Pouring the beer into the ice cream base

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As I said earlier, I don't have an ice cream machine. I resorted to whipping the mixture every hour for 10 minutes over about 6 hours. It was well worth all the hard work. Although in the very outer edge of the finished product it contained a few icicles, the centre was really creamy and fluffy like most gourmet ice creams. I really had my doubts about 'beer ice cream', but the combination with the roast peaches was fantastic. Colin Fassnidge's imagination to marry these two flavours is brilliant. Never would I have thought these would be great to combine in one dish. I can't wait to make my way to Four in Hand to experience other marriages they have come up with.

To end the post I thought I would include the taste testers reaction to the dessert.

Father in-law: "That was delicious! Well worth the wait" (It took me 45 minutes instead of 20 minutes because I stuffed the caramel....but that's another story)

Mother in-law: "It was superb, completely different to anything I have ever tried!"

Daz: "I'm not the ice-creams biggest fan, peaches were good though" (I can always trust Daz to give an unbiased opinion) 

Me: "I can't believe I pulled that off in one day and in SOMEONE ELSES kitchen!"

One last look at the creation.

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