kimchi ice cream

I probably would've never thought of this recipe had I not visited the website of the Salt and Straw(www.saltandstraw.com), an ice cream shop with locations in Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles. Personally, I've never visited a Salt and Straw location in person though that's on my bucket list, let alone travel outside of the Eastern Standard Time Zone. You can't get kimchi ice cream from salt and straw at the moment, though I found an old Yahoo article(https://www.yahoo.com/style/weirdest-ice-cream-flavors-c1432066374299.html) about their kimchi ice cream- they used chocolate covered kimchi(say what?), swirls of kimchi caramel(is that even a thing?) in a jasmine rice ice cream.

Sadly, my recipe is nowhere as sweet as the ice cream I just described. It's 100% savory and spicy, which means this makes for a terrible ice cream choice at 10 pm or later, when I usually crave something sweet. If you do want some semblance of sweetness in this recipe, I suppose you can pour honey on top of the kimchi ice cream.

Considering there is no bona fide recipe for kimchi ice cream on the Internet that you can make at home, I had to go with the base recipe for a typical ice cream made in an ice cream maker- vanilla ice cream(my dad's favorite, though I saw a quart of blue, green, and yellow-colored vanilla ice cream with the Crayola logo at the supermarket today. My dad rejected my offer of getting that for him. Womp-womp[or insert sound effect if someone loses a pricing game on The Price is Right]).

My inspiration for this recipe was from https://www.hamiltonbeach.com/easy-vanilla-ice-cream-for-15-quart-ice-cream-maker.html. You hardly taste any vanilla whatsoever in this ice cream.

When I read the manual for my ice cream maker, it said you can only put mix-ins that are no larger than a chocolate chip, so I had to finely dice the kimchi(a food processor may or may not help in this endeavor). The kimchi ice cream is kind of hard to scoop out, so you're going to need a lot of arm strength and elbow grease to retrieve your ice cream.

You will need:

For the equipment:

A large bowl
An ice cream maker
An ice cream tub

For the ice cream:

2 cups of half-and-half
1 cup of heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup of granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp. of vanilla extract
3/4 cups of finely diced kimchi
Any remaining kimchi juice
Honey on top to sweeten the ice cream(optional)

1. Pour the first four ingredients into a large bowl. Mix well until the vanilla extract and sugar are distributed evenly among the base for this ice cream.
2. Turn your ice cream maker on and pour the base into the ice cream maker. Let the ice cream maker churn for 10-15 minutes, or until the mixture is thick and starts to freeze.
3. Pour the kimchi and remaining kimchi juice into the ice cream maker while it's still churning. Let the ice cream maker churn for an additional 5 minutes and during that process, you may need to scrape the ice cream from the edges of the bowl that's part of the ice cream maker and distribute the kimchi into the ice cream mixture.
4. After the ice cream is done churning and the kimchi has been distributed evenly into the ice cream, put the ice cream into a 1.5 quart ice cream tub.
5. Close the lid of the tub and put it in the freezer for at least 2 hours or overnight.
6. If you want some sweetness in your ice cream, top with honey. Bon appetit!

Makes 1.5 quarts.