Calisson ice-cream for New Year’s Eve
Calisson ice-cream had been on our mind for a while now, since we got offered a tiny ice-cream recipes book with this one featuring.
Calisson is a small delicacy from the south of France. It is aesthetically perfect, a smooth and silky pebble with sharp angles making it as streamlined as an Airstream van. I’ve always been fond of this almondy paste with a sugar icing… although I have to say the taste is not that refined. But calissons benefit from their everlasting reputation of luxury delicacy.
The ingredients are :
- 100g of finely ground almond paste.
- 210g of sugar.
- 6 egg yolks.
- 3/4 L of milk.
- 1/3 L of cream.
- 100g of candied melon (we found some on the Christmas Market, but it was the first time I had seen some…)
- 100g of candied orange.
The recipe :
Heat the milk, cream and half of the sugar. Meanwhile, liquidize the melon and orange with a bit of hot milk. Add to the rest of the milk, along with the almond paste. Let infuse for 20min, then sieve.
Beat the yolks with the sugar until it whitens. Add to the sieved preparation, then cook the mix up to 83°. Once chilled, it’s ready to be frozen.
We went to crank in the streets of Paris, at 10pm, on New Year’s Eve, with quite a lot of drunk passer-bys wondering about our occupation.
We had already stuffed ourselves with the meal, so we only had a taste of the ice-cream, which revealed itself to be smooth, creamy, a perfect frozen version of the Calisson (which we had on the side, to compare). It is nonetheless a very rich ice-cream, that can get cloying rather quickly, due to the heady almond flavour . To be enjoyed reasonably!
That sounds great! I love callison too. What was the sweetness level like? Is the almond paste different from marzipan?
I was thinking that if it the paste had glucose syrup in it and you added candied melon, and a cup of sugar then it would end up having quite a lot of sugar in it. Was that the reason it was cloying?
Oops I wrote “Almond paste” when I should have written “Finely ground almonds”, because that’s what we added, and not marzipan at all… sorry.
It was not too sweet (anyway I suppose that when you decide to do an ice cream from a sweet you expect it to be sweet indeed, and that’s also part of the taste). Anyway after the meal we had, even a radish would have seemed cloying, I think… I’ll try the leftovers and keep you informed!