Welcome to another Milk Bar Monday!
This week we tackled our most challenging recipe yet. It was a multiple step process with weird ingredients.
It all started out a little rocky for me when I was looking through the recipe, trying to figure out what all I needed, and saw the pistachio crunch required pistachio nut paste and feuilletine. Umm…what??
When I went to my local grocery store I knew there was no way they would have either one of these speciality items. As I was walking around I called all the health food stores, grocery stores, and kitchen supply stores in West Lafayette and Carmel.
No such luck with anything. After a quick google search I found I could make my own pistachio paste and substitute the feuilletine with corn flakes. No big deal…or so I thought!
Making the pistachio nut paste turned out to be super expensive (1 cup of pistachios at my store = $8) and not as easy as I expected. I actually overheated my Vitamix forcing me to use my little hand choppy thing and do it in small batches.
I also ended up having to add some green food coloring, otherwise it would have been a gross brown paste. So not appetizing.
The beets took forever to roast to a mushy state and I was a little worried the ganache was going to break with the lime juice, but it luckily all worked out.
And did I mention the frozen yogurt? Yeah, chèvre, buttermilk, plain yogurt (which didn’t exist at my store so I used plain greek yogurt) and citric acid. I was able to find citric acid in the canning area of the baking aisle. And instead of buying a big thing of buttermilk and throwing it away tomorrow (I’m moving out of my apartment tomorrow) I just made my own.
Christina Tosi’s ice cream method is pretty ingenious. She uses gelatin instead of the typical anglaise method. For me it was awesome because I didn’t end up with oversized ice crystals and it set up very nicely in the freezer. She does say to serve after spun but I like it better the next day.
I found that the components in this recipe are best eaten together. Of course I tasted each one on it’s own, but I wasn’t big on the ganache with out the the other things and the frozen yogurt was good but I’d rather add something else to it next time. It would be delicious swirled with other ice creams too.
To get the full recipe head on over to Jacqueline’s site The Dusty Baker. She also made it cow-dairy and gluten free! (She’s pretty amazing because I don’t know how I would have handled this recipe with many more adaptations.)
The other ladies participating this week are Meagan at Scarletta Bakes and Audra at The Baker Chick — small group today!
You can also check out our board on Pinterest and our group on Twitter!
Homemade Pistachio Nut Paste
Okay, remember how I said I had to do this in small batches? Well, it’s not how I started off but what I would do if I made it next time. If you have a nice food processor I highly recommend using that. Recipe adapted from Kitchen Wench.
Ingredients:
- 500 grams of pistachios – preferably raw/unsalted and skinned. I could only find the shelled/roasted ones so I went ahead and used those
- 250 grams caster sugar (I pulsed regular sugar in my little hand choppy thing and then measured out 250 grams)
- 3 tbsp light corn syrup
- 1/3 cup water
To Make the Paste:
- Divide the pistachios and sugar into 3 bowls.*
- Put the first batch into your choppy thing and add 1 tbsp corn syrup and about 1/3 of the water.
- Start of by pulsing the mixture until it starts to break down. Once broken down mix on full speed until….pasty. Mine was very much like play dough.
- Repeat with the remaining batches. I stored my leftovers in the fridge.
*If you are using your food processor you can put everything into the bowl of the processor and then go from there. Pulse…Pulse…Mix and hopefully you end up with a pasty ingredient. This was definitely a challenge so don’t be discouraged if it seems like it’s not working out perfectly!
Other awesome Momofuku Milk Bar recipes we have made:
Want to buy the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook and make awesome things like this at home? You can find it here and get started this week!
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This is seriously awesome…beets are my favorite and I especially love them in sweet applications! The pistachio paste and the chevre in the ice cream sounds wonderful as well…I want to taste this!
I wish I could share it with you!
Oh my goodness. I love everything about this. I adore beets and making a dessert out of it is plain lovely.
You would never have known you didn’t get everything lined up 100% perfectly in this recipe! It looks beautiful and amazing!
Thanks Jen!
Those beets are gorgeous!
pistachio nut paste and feuilletine were a couple of the reasons I sat this week out, and no ice cream maker, and I am so sorry to hear about your Vita. Hopefully it came “back to life” as they usually do after an hour or so after an overheating incident.
Girl, I hope you *really* really really loved this ice cream after all that!
Haha it was pretty good, but I will probably not go to the trouble to make the ganache or nut crunch again. The frozen yogurt was the best part of it all so I’ll probably make that again sometime in the future. I *definitely* need to start reading the recipes farther ahead of time so I can order these things instead of struggling my way through them.
Wow this looks incredible! And sounds like a lot of work! Way to stick with it! I have never heard of the ingredient you couldn’t find, Feuilletine. The color from the beets is gorgeous and the frozen yogurt sounds insane!
Thanks Lacy! If you are feeling ambitious I recommend giving it a try!
Go Girl! I am very proud of us for sticking with this recipe. It would have been way easier to just not make it (I almost wanted to quit a couple times,) but it was so worth it! Weird but good and very satisfying to plate right?!
Yes! I totally wanted to quit with the crunch and the ganache…uhg. But now I feel like I can tackle most of these recipes!
Wow, this is so stunning, Erin! I am definitely going to be making this. I love goat cheese, I can’t imagine the amazing frozen yogurt that it makes!
The frozen yogurt was amazing! Next time I want to mix the crunch in when the frozen yogurt is in the ice cream maker – it would be so tasty!
This is absolutely gorgeous! I don’t even like beets but I still want to devour this entire thing!
The ganache definitely doesn’t taste like beets – well I didn’t think it did. The lime really brightens it up, and with the goat cheese ice cream it’s like a match made in heaven
Wow, that does sound involved, but I am loving all the flavor combinations! YUM! Hugs, Terra
Yup, I definitely didn’t pick the easiest recipe from the bunch! But the final products are all SO DARN PRETTY! And thanks for making the pistachio paste first and warning us all
I think none of us attempted after that 
I found this recipe more inspirational for how to compose such desserts more than anything – felt pretty nifty, plating it 
GORGEOUS SHOTS!
I would have taken one look at that recipe and ran away! I’m awed that you preservered! I would never have imagined all those ingredients together.
This is stunning! Great job!
This looks so good! I love all the flavor combinations.
This is stunning!! Just what I need to make with my beets that will be ready in the garden any day now!