Sea Salt Ice Cream Recipe

The black stuff's volcanic salt from Scoop Wholefoods, which I thought it'll be a nice touch to the ice cream, but clearly, was mistaken. It stained the ice cream something fierce, and also made it much, much too salty. Skip the other fancy salt, but you should 100% serve this ice cream with caramel popcorn. They're a perfect pairing. 

Without the caramel popcorn to sooth over the sea salt, the saltiness becomes a bit more pronounced. Adventurous eaters love it, but some other folks weren't exactly shy in telling me how weird they find this ice cream. It's a rather controversial recipe, despite being Murphy's Ice Cream best-selling flavour. It's a crowd-pleaser, but you do have to find the right crowd. 

Depending on how salty the sea salt you use, you'll need to adjust how much salt to add to this recipe. The team at Murphy's harvests sea salt from Dingle, and uses 2 teaspoon of the Dingle sea salt per recipe. They've suggested for people using Maldon, to use 20% less salt (roughly 1.5 tsp) instead. I used fleur de sel for this recipe, which I find 1 scant teaspoon to be the happy medium between the sweetness of the cream with just a touch of saltiness. 

Sea Salt Ice Cream Recipe 

Original Recipe from Murphy's Ice Cream

Ingredients:

5 egg yolks

120g sugar

220 ml milk

3/4-1 scant tsp of fleur de sel (or 1 1/2 tsp maldon sea salt flakes)

220 ml cream

Steps

1. In a medium-sized bowl, beat the egg yolks with sugar with an electric whisk until the mixture thickens up and lightens in colour, about a few minutes.

2. In a medium-sized saucepan, heat the milk until it starts to simmer. Remove from heat. 

3. Slowly drizzle the milk into the egg yolk mixture while continuing to whisk. When combined, pour the mixture back into the saucepan. 

4. Set the saucepan over low heat, and slowly warm up the mixture until it reaches 65-70C. Remove from heat once the mixture has reached that temperature. Cooking the mixture further to 76C will cook the egg yolks and turn them into scrambled eggs. (Though if this happens, you can strain out the cooked eggs and proceed with the rest of the recipe.) 

5. Let the mixture cool, then stir in the sea salt. 

6. In a clean bowl, whip the heavy cream to soft peaks (it should just about double in volume. Gently fold the cream into the custard. Let the mixture cool thoroughly in the fridge. 

7. Using an ice cream machine and following the manufacturer's instructions, complete the ice cream recipe.