Green Tea Ice Cream with Chocolate Rice Crisps

This recipe is from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. I have had very limited success with making green tea ice cream prior to using this recipe. The big reason is brewing the tea. In the past I would stick tea bags into the hot milk and cream and let them steep for a good while. I could never get enough tea flavor into the ice cream which probably was due t the nature of the fat in the liquid clogging the tea bag. Mr. Lebovitz's recipe uses matcha, Japanese green tea powder that eliminates this problem.

The advantage of matcha is that it is powdered. This means you are not steeping anything. Just dump it in and stir it up. The other big deal with matcha is that you are actually eating the tea. This means you get more health benefits from the good stuff within the tea.

The disadvantage of matcha is it is very expensive. How expensive? It can run you anywhere from $18 to $40 USD per ounce. Luckily a little goes a long way. There are cheaper alternatives. Some Korean green teas are powdered and less costly, but I have yet to try them.

Mr. Lebovitz's recipe is great, but I really wanted to make it my own. To that end I added the chocolate rice crisps. If you have ever had genmai-cha, green tea with roasted brown rice, than you know that adding crispy rice cereal to the ice cream will enhance the flavor. I couldn't help but add the chocolate too. Think of this as green tea ice cream with dark chocolate Krackle Bars. I incorporated pieces of the crisps into the ice cream. It works well, but I think that the chocolate becomes the star as opposed to the green tea (Mrs. Fellow likes it this way). Next time I make this, I will serve big pieces of the chocolate rice crisps on the side as garnish. When it comes to the final product, either way will work well, it just depends on your taste.


This is the work sheet for the ice cream:



Green Tea ice Cream:

1 cup whole milk
¾ cup sugar
Pinch of salt
2 cups heavy cream
4 tsp matcha
6 egg yolks

1. Put the milk, sugar, and salt into a small saucepan and heat until a bare simmer.
2. Meanwhile, beat the eggs
3. Put the cream in a large bowl and stir in the matcha. Be careful with this step. Matcha tends to clump and if you beat the cream to much it becomes whipped cream. Your best option is to use a small fine sieve to dust some of the tea into the cream, then mix it in and repeat until all the tea is incoporated. NOTE - it will not be very green at this stage.
4. Add some of the heated milk to the eggs and mix gently. Do this a couple more times to ensure that the eggs are properly warmed.
5. Put the eggs into the saucepan with the milk and heat until 175 degrees F. Stir continuously.
6. Strain the custard into the cream.
7. Beat the custard with a wire wisk until frothy, you should notice that it gets a lot greener.
8. Let custard go to room temperature, chill overnight, then freeze in you ice cream machine. Add in the chocolate rice crisp pieces towards the last minunte of freezing in your ice cream machine.

Chocolate Rice Crisps:

8 ounces semi-sweet or bitter-sweet chocolate (I used a combination of both)
½ cup crispy rice cereal (like Rice Crsipies)

1. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler
2. Add the cereal, stir to fully incoporate
3. Spread in a thin layer on a tray and place in the freezer to harden into a solid block of candy.
4. Once frozen, break the block into small pieces.
5. You can also leave them as big pieces and garnish the ice cream as I did in the photograph.