Thai Tea Ice Cream Recipe

What a journey! I started experimenting with Thai tea ice cream since 2016, but it took almost two years before I'm happy with the final product. 

A trip to Thailand a few years ago whetted my craving for Thai Iced Tea, and I haven't been able to quite get it out of my head. In the blazing humidity of Phuket, sipping from a chilled cup of sweetened Thai tea go a fair bit in making the sun bearable. Back in Singapore, where we suffer from the same ferocity of the sun, Cha Thai provides me with my tea fix. In the Melbournian winter, I keep warm with hot Thai tea that I brew. (Number One brand is one of the better commercial brands for Thai Tea leaves, and available at $5.50 per 400g from the Asian grocers in Clayton across Coles.) The best Thai tea, a Bangkok friend helpfully informed me, is made by boiling the tea leaves in evaporated milk, and then sweetening each cup with a dollop of condensed milk and served over ice. (No wonder it tastes so good!) I haven't worked out the courage to try that at home, and content myself with using boiling water instead. In making ice cream however, all bets are off. Because adding water causes the ice cream to become icy, tea leaves are boiled with cream and milk. 

The team at Serious Eats and the community at Food52 have come up with their version of Thai Tea. I tried both recipes side-by-side, and I had adapted Food52's recipe as below. If you're interested, see the explanation below on what's good (and what's not!) for both recipes. 

Thai Tea Ice Cream

Makes roughly 1 quart
Adapted from Food52
Some bloggers (David Lebovitz, an alumni of Chez Panisse and authors of several cookbooks) have similar tastes in regards to sweetness as I do, but most community-submitted recipes are far too sweet for my taste. I suspect I'm not alone. When chatting to a few baking friends, most reflect similar views. I've adjusted the condensed milk proportion to reflect my taste, which seemed to be the consensus of my house mates as well. 


INGREDIENTS
375g heavy cream
480g (2 cups) whole milk 
1 dash salt
90g (1 cup) Thai tea leaves
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla
200g condensed milk

STEPS
1) In a small saucepan set over medium heat, combine heavy cream, salt, and milk with tea leaves until almost simmering. Remove from flame and steep until at room temperature. 

2) Strain the tea leaves from the mixture and discard. The liquid content may seem really little, and may look like a tea-leaves-slurry-from-hell, but it's all part of the plan! Remember we haven't added the condensed milk or the egg yolks yet. Just strain out as much tea leaves as you can. (One good tip that I'd found online was to use a handkerchief for fine straining purposes. I hadn't tried that for myself yet, and will update this page after I do.)

3) Beat egg yolks into the mixture, and gently heat over a small flame until the mixture thickens. The mixture should coat a spatula and running your finger across the spatula should leave a line that remains. Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla and condensed milk. Let chill completely before freezing according to ice cream maker's instructions.

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THE COMPARISON: SERIOUS EATS AND FOOD52
First off: Food52's recipe wins for appearance. It develops a vibrant deep amber, likely courtesy of the recipe stipulating twice as amount of Thai tea leaves as Serious Eats. 

Texture-wise, Food52 takes the cake too. Freshly-churned from the ice cream maker, it's soft, sticky and dense, almost like a gelato's consistency. After a night in the freezer, it hardens but still retains a spherical shape from a scoop. Serious Eats creates an icier version with flecks of thai tea leaves left on your tongue after the ice cream melts away - and there's no way to change that. Which brings me to the most important point...

Preparation: the most time consuming part is straining out the tea leaves - seriously, it takes ages. In this regard, Food52's version wins hands-down. You sift the tea leaves from the cream and milk while the mixture is still runny, then add the egg yolks in. Virtually no tea leaves could be seen. Serious Eat's recipe mixes the egg yolks in before sifting the tea leaves off, and the thickened mixture both takes a long time and results in a mixture that still contains many large speckles of tea leaves. 

Another boon in Food52's favour: Food52 uses two egg yolks compared to Serious Eats's six eggs yolks. As someone who still have a dozen egg whites from previous recipes frozen in the freezer, I'm keen not to add to my stockpile further.  

So it looks like a rout for Food52... except not quite. The original recipe uses one can of condensed milk, which resulted in an intense cloyingly sweetness that turned one's stomach. The container holding Thai tea ice cream by Serious Eats, for all of its fault, emptied within a few days in the freezer, while the container of Food52's Thai tea ice cream languished for the next few weeks. Here, I've dialed down the sweetness here to a more nuanced level: I increased the amount of heavy cream by 140g, and cut the condensed milk to 1/2 of the original quantity. This resulted in an ice cream consistency that's still smooth and sticky without being overtly sweet.