Turrón ice cream —and Summer 2020 in Santa Barbara
It happens every year: Summer dwindles away and I hold onto it for dear life. It’s easy to think that way, when I look through my window and the sun is shining, and I go outside and sit on the patio and I don’t even need a light jacket. I scroll down through Instagram and all the beautiful, talented people I follow are praising the coming of fall and embracing it with open arms.
I, in the other hand, hope for the Indian summer, the “veranillo de San Miguel”, as we call it in Spain. And for helado de turrón, turrón ice cream, possibly my favorite —and one I can not find in the US.
My recipe for today is of an ice cream. Yes, I know, I should have posted this at the beginning of summer. But this is not any common ice cream. This is turrón ice cream. And if you don’t know about turrón, just click here and you’ll understand why I’m posting this now.
Arriving in Santa Barbara
This mural welcomes us at the airport
The Spanish style Arlington Theater opened in 1931
The Santa Barbara Courthouse
Turrón (if you want a translation, it could be Spanish nougat) is the most typical Christmas treat in Spain. It’s, what I call, an idiosyncrasy of Spain, and as such is presented in Mama Ía blog. We have many other Christmas treats (check here), but there is no house in Spain without turrón at Christmastime.
Decades ago when I was a young girl, there were two kinds of turrón: turrón de Jijona and turrón de Alicante, or soft turrón and hard turrón. Both made exclusively of marcona almonds and honey, the almonds in soft turrón were ground, while the hard turrón was made of whole pealed almonds. Nowadays, there are turrones in every flavor you can imagine. They all still hold the same shape, though: a tablet. But the flavors and ingredients they’re made with are endless.
The Santa Ynez Mountains, seen from the Stearns Wharf
For today’s recipe of turrón ice cream I’m combining two favorite seasons, summer and winter, and let’s not call it fall, because we are not there yet, at least not in my books or in my internal and mental calendar.
For that very same reason, I’m accompanying the recipe with some photos of our trip this summer. This was the first time we haven’t traveled to Spain in the summer for many years; instead we traveled to California to visit my son Matthew, who now lives in Santa Barbara.
The Santa Barbara Mission
The golden hour
It was a wonderful trip in which we managed to do all the activities we wouldn’t have otherwise done on a trip to California, considering this was a first trip there for our youngest son. We slashed from the program trips to Los Angeles and to San Francisco, trying to avoid the big cities, and instead stayed in Santa Barbara for a few days, drove at a leisurely pace up north on Highway 1 to the Monterey Peninsula, and stopped along the way here and there —to watch the whales, to picnic, to visit missions, to hike the Big Sur mountains, to eat delicious food alfresco at wonderful restaurants, to ride bicycles and to kayak along the coast. How fun!
For a few days we forgot about the pandemic, in the pure sense of being confined. There was no indoor dining at restaurants, but we didn’t need it. We had to walk around with masks on, but we didn’t care. We couldn’t visit the interior of the Spanish missions, but we walked in the gardens and admired their surroundings. We couldn’t visit museums or monuments but we fell in love with the mountains and the sea and all we could do in them. There were many silver linings to the current world conditions, but in some cases they even felt like gold. There was so much to see, so much to do, and our whole complete family to enjoy and do it all together.
Santa Barbara is Matthew’s home base now, and I’m sharing photos of that part of the trip today. Hopefully the Indian summer stays with us and I’ll share some more photos of the trip.
I still miss not having been to Spain and visit with my sisters and friends, with my mom and uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces. I miss not having woken up to the view of the Mediterranean or gone to bed after an ice cream on the promenade in Alcocebre. I missed helado de turrón, turrón ice cream, and now I make it.
Turrón ice cream is creamy and has the full flavor of turrón: the almonds and honey blending in a perfect symphony. If you have a leftover turrón bar from last Christmas, or you can already purchase the ones for next Christmas, make this ice cream. You will discover your new favorite flavor.
NOTE: for another turrón dessert, click here
TURRÓN ICE CREAM Helado de Turrón
Ingredients
- 7 oz Jijona turrón the soft, creamy one (1 bar, about 200 gr)
- 1 cup whole milk
- 3 egg yolks
- 3 Tbs granulated sugar
- 2 Tbs honey
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup whipping cream
- 1 oz Alicante turrón the hard kind, optional
Instructions
- The night before, place the bowl of the ice cream maker in the freezer.
- In a saucepan over medium-low heat add the milk, egg yolks, sugar, honey and vanilla. Stir until the mix starts to thicken, between 160 and 170ºF (I used a candy thermometer, but you don’t really need one, it’s easy to see). At this point, remove the saucepan from the heat source and set aside.
- Break or cut the turrón bar into smaller pieces. Add to the saucepan and blend —I started out using a potato masher and finished with an immersion blender.
- Cover and place the mixture in the fridge for a few hours so the flavors blend well
- Whip the cream until soft peaks form. With a spatula, gently incorporate the whipped cream into the turrón mixture. Mix well until fully incorporated.
- Prepare the ice cream maker: bring the bowl out of the freezer just before processing the ice cream and follow the manufacturers instructions. In most cases, you’ll have to start the machine and, with the machine running, slowly pour the mixture into the bowl. The ice cream will be ready in about 20 minutes, and it will be of a soft consistency.
- If it will not be consummed immediately, pour the ice cream into a freezer resistant container and place it in the freezer.
- If you have turrón de Alicante (the hard kind), mash a few pieces of it in a mortar and sprinkle over the ice cream before serving.
