Hello, welcome to newsletter No. 24! I’m glad to have you here.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re already a subscriber, a fellow follower of all that is exciting and engaging about the world of baking, from whole grains to seasonal fruit and flavour-forward ingredients.
If this is your first time here, you can expect musings, commentary, ideas and inspiration concerning the act and art of baking, including its more esoteric bits and pieces.
Once you know how to make parfait, you can legitimately wonder why you’d bother making ice cream; such is the ease and versatility of it.
The pros outweigh the cons when producing a run of seasonal summer treats for easy service in a busy bakery. The parfait is the low-tech, easy-to-mix and scale solution for the few weeks each year when customers are too hot and bothered for bakes and, quite frankly, are only interested in cold, sweet things to apply immediately to face.
Use your arsenal of knowledge on brownies, cookies, genoise and dacquoise, and the world of ice cream sandwiches opens up ready for exploration, right on time for ridiculous record-breaking heat.
The components of parfait, and its sibling, the semifreddo, are essentially many formats of foam. Parfait combines an egg yolk foam in the form of pâté à bombe with semi-whipped cream. In contrast, Semifreddos combine Italian meringue (egg white foam) with semi-whipped cream and can also include pâté à bombe and/or Crème Pâtissière.
Parfait has become my preference (at least for now) as it has a denser quality than the more airy semifreddo. As a result, it feels more akin to ice cream on the palette but does not melt as quickly, a very welcome thing when working in the heat of the bakery.
Today, I’m sharing an ice cream sandwich recipe with a flavour combo that is classic and undeniable to the vast majority…Chocolate Buckwheat and Vanilla. The two components are assembled into one enormous sandwich and cut into portion-sized bars for ease.
The versatility of the two base recipes will set you on the road to exploring your own combinations. Add a ripple of raspberry puree or chunks of toasted nut praline to the parfait, or add toasted walnuts to the brownie. Replace the brownie with a genoise or chiffon sponge for a result that, to my mind, is reminiscent of Arctic roll but in the best possible way.
If time and patience are on your side, you can cut disks of parfait from the frozen slab using a cookie cutter and sandwich them between a pair of your favourite chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies. The world if your ICS oyster.
As always, read the recipe several times to familiarise yourself with the stages. My failed adventures in ice cream adjacent frozen desserts taught me that, as with all baking, good mise en place and timing will make your life easier and the results superior.
The moving parts of the parfait process happen somewhat simultaneously; if needed, you can press pause on the syrup just after the sugar has dissolved to avoid overshooting 116°C. This will give you time to whip your cream to the required thickness; you can store this in the fridge until needed whilst you get the syrup back on the heat and the bombe stage back on track.
For subscribers to the ‘Extra Credit’ portion of the newsletter, there’s a bonus recipe for Almond & Meadowsweet ice cream sandwiches which sees blooms of Meadowsweet used to infuse the cream for the parfait lending a Tonka bean-like flavour. This technique can be used for other aromatic edible flowers and soft, tender summer herbs.