#6 Root Beer

In 1876, Charles Hire invented ROOT BEER. THANK YOU, CHARLES HIRE! Your sweet fantastic beverage has become a special treat for children of all ages (adults included). It gets even sweeter when combined with ice cream to form the penultimate dessert: THE ROOT BEER FLOAT. (YEAH! I'm really excited about this ice cream.)

So, this week, I present to you the ultimate dessert: root beer ice cream. A&W, the number one selling root beer in the world, was selected as the provider of root beer for this experiment in ice cream making. I followed the basic ice cream recipe, but cut the sugar down to 1/2 cup and mixed in 1 cup of cream instead of whole milk. Once that was well heated I added 2 cups of A&W's Root Beer and let the carbonation cook off while constantly stirring and whisking with the immersion blender. Next I added 2.5 cups more cream to the mixture along with a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, then whisked until it was all thoroughly blended.

I used a high volume of cream (and no milk) in this recipe to offset the wateriness of the root beer. I could have used root beer extract to flavor the cream, but why use an extract when you can use the real thing? (This does not apply to vanilla extract, or peppermint extract, or cinnamon extract, which definitely do wonders in ice creams!)

Initial tastings of the root beer ice cream were very intriguing. It tastes like root beer (as expected) but it doesn't have that strong kick at the finish like root beer soda. Somewhere along the way of the ice creamification process the root beer flavor was fundamentally altered, but this is definitely not a bad thing - at least it's not a bad thing in terms of flavor. It is a bad thing in terms of your brain expecting the kick of the root beer to, well, kick in, but it never happens SO YOU JUST KEEP EATING IT hoping that this will be the bite that has the bite!

The addition of vanilla and the icy-creamy texture make it seem like all the ice cream in a root beer float melted, got mixed in with the root beer, and then the entire concoction froze in a freak blizzard, which in a sense is exactly what happened. (The freak blizzard was the ice cream machine.)

Of course, all of this means that any soda could potentially be turned into ice cream. Dr. Pepper? Coca-Cola? Ginger Ale? The possibilities... are at the soda aisle of your local grocery store.

The final product, garnished with a root beer candy!