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Ice Cream with Hot Maple Syrup
Ice cream served with hot maple syrup. The syrup is boiled to a soft waxy ball and served very hot. It is delicious. Serve your cream in slices.
Two ingredients and one temperature to hit. Everything depends on how far the maple syrup is boiled.
- "Soft waxy ball" means the soft-ball stageDrop a little of the boiling syrup into cold water; at soft ball it gathers into a lump that flattens between the fingers. On a thermometer that is 235-240F. Boiled much beyond that it is liable to set hard on the cold cream rather than staying a sauce.
- Boil it in something oversizedMaple syrup foams up hard as it approaches the soft-ball stage. Use a saucepan at least three times the volume of the syrup and stir down the foam rather than letting it climb.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. About 1/2 cup of syrup boiled down will yield noticeably less than that in finished sauce -- call it a tablespoon or so per plate for four, since reduced maple is very sweet.
- "Serve your cream in slices"This assumes ice cream frozen in a brick or a mould and turned out, then cut across into slabs. A loaf pan lined with parchment gives the same effect; freeze firm, unmould, and cut with a warmed knife.
- Serve it genuinely hotThe point of the dish is the contrast, and reduced maple thickens fast as it cools. Pour it over the slices at the table, straight from the pan.
- Grade of syrupA darker syrup, sold now as Grade A Dark or Very Dark, gives a more pronounced maple flavour. Pale early-season syrup mostly reads as sweet once reduced.
- Cold platesChill the serving plates first. Hot syrup on ice cream on a room-temperature plate turns to soup within a minute.
Maple sugar and syrup were a distinctively North American sweetener, and by the late nineteenth century maple appears in dessert chapters as a flavour in its own right rather than only as a cheaper stand-in for cane sugar. Boiling syrup back down to the soft-ball stage is the sugar-house technique behind maple candy and the taffy poured over packed snow at sugaring-off parties; here it is borrowed for a warm sauce. The dish assumes ice cream frozen in a brick or mould firm enough to slice.