Amazing Toasted Rye Bread Ice Cream

St Patrick's Day Dessert: toasted rye bread ice cream with caramel and caraway seeds. This recipe is a top 3 favorite ice cream of mine!!!

With St Patrick's Day happening this weekend there's a decent chance you might have some left over rye bread this weekend. Or is it Easter? Honestly when I think rye bread I'm like "...it's March or April?"...it's a spring recipe so let's start there. Either way if you have rye bread after a ruben, you need to make this ice cream. And granted, I'm sure reading 'toasted rye bread ice cream' isn't calling your name like a 'thin mint ice cream' but I promise you, this recipe is outstanding. The reality is this taste close to a 'cinnamon toast crunch' ice cream actually and I think it's the toasting that makes it that way. 

What this recipe also did for us is open us up to the trick of adding a slice of bread to all of our ice cream recipes from now on. Adding the bread, or in the previous case when we made oatmeal ice cream-oats, makes the ice cream stretchy and chewy not icy and hard. Our previous ice cream recipes ARE very creamy, but this adds a subtle shift to make it kind of stretchier and elastic. We're pretty convinced it's the bread/oatmeal and that it can translate to other recipes with just a bit of white bread instead. 

And then there's the caramel. OH THE CARAMEL. While this ice cream is amazing as is and does give you that more intense rye flavor, a little caramel doesn't hurt. Especially if it's home made caramel. Now to be honest, caramel is a touch tricky to make at home. It's not the ingredients. It's not the steps. It's the time. Caramel, is the kind of persnickety. It goes from perfect to burnt in 20 seconds. Actually two seconds. Two very fast, very real seconds. 

Toasted Rye Bread Ice Cream with Caraway Seeds

INGREDIENTS

• 1 1/2 cups whole milk ( plus approximately 1/2 cup additional cups)
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream (plus approximately 1/8 cup additional)
• Pinch of table salt (about 1/8th tsp plus a touch more)
• 4 pieces of rye toast with seeds
• 1 tsp caraway seeds - there is no alternative
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 5 large egg yolks

DIRECTIONS

1. Freeze ice cream machine shell hours before you need it.

2. To make ice cream base, heat 1 1/2 cups whole milk, 1/2 cup cream and salt in a medium pan over medium heat until the milk is steaming.

3. Add the toasted rye bread, caraway seeds, cinnamon sticks. Remove the pan from heat and leave rye bread, caraway and cinnamon to sit for 1-1.5 hours.

4. Discard the cinnamon sticks. Strain the rye & caraway seeds. We used a nut milk bag, but you could also use cheesecloth. This will be a slightly messy process. You need to squeeze as much liquid out of the rye as possible into a measuring cup. We put in 2 cups of liquid (cream and whole milk) into the pan originally and we want add enough additional liquid to bring it back up to the 2 cup mark since the toast absorbs some liquid. 

5.  Replace the difference between the strained liquid amount and two cups with a 1:3 ratio of cream to whole milk. It doesn't have to be perfect since adding the toast makes the recipe more forgiving. But if, for example, you needed to replace almost 3/4 cup liquid, you would add 1/2 cup whole milk to 1/8 cup cream as we have in the directions. 

6. In a separate bowl create an ice bath. Add remaining 1 cup heavy cream to a large bowl and set aside for later. 

7. Reheat the rye infused cream mixture on the stove until steaming, whisk in sugar and dissolve.

8. In another bowl, whisk egg yolks together and slowly pour in the heated cream mi from the stove to temper the eggs. If you add this to the eggs too quickly, they will not be smooth.

9.  Add the egg yolk and milk mixture back into the original cream mix saucepan on medium heat until the mixture can coat the back of a spoon (stir often). The temperature range of 158-176 F is what you are looking for. If you feel the eggs may have curdled a bit, pour the milk and egg custard mix through a fine mesh sieve.

10. Add the rye infused mixture w/ sugar into the remaining heavy cream bowl in the ice bath and whisk. 

11. Place the mixture into the fridge and wait to chill completely before attempting to make ice cream.

12. Use your machine's instructions to churn.

Caramel Recipe Notes:
If you're interested in making the caramel, we used the Serious Eats recipe. We halved the recipe quantity and used vanilla extract.

Worth noting: the recipe was slightly off for us specifically related to the caramelization of sugars. Be ready with the cream once you see a 1/2 dollar size amount of amber color at the bottom. Add the cream THEN and start knocking down the foam. We also found that the temperature of the caramel got to our target mark of 225 much much quicker than the recipe (this might be our stovetop burner). It took about 30 - 45 sec after the cream for the caramel to hit that mark. We immediately pull the caramel from heat and stirred a few times, double checked the temperature and then dispensed the caramel into a pyrex measuring cup to remove it from heat entirely, then added sea salt to taste. 

Make other ice cream recipes:

Strawberry Rhubarb Rose Ice Cream

Oatmeal Ice Cream