Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream

Sticky Toffee Pudding, Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream & Toffee Sauce 

I recently attended  Nicole Weston's informative class on food blogging at the New School of Cooking in Culver City. You can read about it elsewhere on my blog. Here's a recipe for Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream that Weston shared with us but hasn't yet posted on her popular Baking Bites blog. It will be in her new ice cream cookbook, due out next year. Meanwhile, here's an advance look, with additional notes on making brown butter from the recipe for Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies in her 2009 cookbook, The Baking Bites. Brown butter seems to be one of Weston's favorite ingredients. From the rich and sensuous taste of this ice cream, I can see why!

Vanilla Bean Brown Butter Ice Cream

1/3 cup butter

2/3 cup sugar

1 cup milk

Seeds scraped from split vanilla bean

2 cups heavy cream

Melt the butter in a saucepan over low-medium heat until butter has turned an amber color and smells toasty but not burnt. (The butter turns brown after 4 or 5 minutes, Weston said.) Add sugar and milk and stir for a minute or two until the sugar dissolves.

Remove the pan from the heat. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape seeds out using the back of a knife. Add the beans to the milk, sugar and butter mixture. Stir to incorporate. Then stir in the cream.

Put the mixture into the refrigerator to chill completely--for about 6 hours or so. Remove it from the refrigerator and stir. Pour into an ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer's directions.

We enjoyed the ice cream with Weston's Sticky Toffee Pudding, a recipe you can find at her Baking Bites website. For those of us without an ice cream maker, Weston said it's definitely worth the investment for ice cream lovers. She has an excellent discussion on how to choose one at her blog.