Flavor #49 - Ocha! お茶

I was 14 when I first had Green Tea ice cream and I know exactly where I was at that moment. Coming home from my freshman year of high school, this little store that was on the road from the school to the train station in Tokyo's western suburbs. What I really liked about it was its unusual, yet compelling, flavor and the addition of a frozen circle of whipped cream in the middle of the cup.

The store is still there, but the only pictures I can find of the little shop all have the store with the shutters closed. And I can not seem to find a shot of a single up of green tea ice cream with the frozen whipped cream in the middle. Ben & Jerry's made a big splash recently when they put out their flavor with a fudge column in the middle, the whipped cream in the middle was decades earlier. But I digress.

1 Cup of Heavy Cream

1 Cup of Milk

1/2 Cup of Sugar

1 Pinch of Salt

2 Tablespoons + 1 Teaspoon of Matcha (Ground Green Tea)

The most difficult part of this recipe was finding the Matcha. It's not that hard to find, I guess I was going to the wrong Asian food stores. It can be expensive too. At one store, it was $38 an ounce! Matcha is a special type of green tea. It is specially prepared green tea leaves ground into a fine powder. It would taste completely different if you took dried green tea leaves and ground them down. I tried more than once to get this to come out the way I wanted and finally had to roll back the amount of Matcha from the initial recipe I was using as the ice cream came out way too bitter. I also think that green tea goes so well with whipped cream that I added it in for my personal serving. Some people will add a scoop of vanilla to it, which tastes pretty good too!

Two years ago I got to go back to my high school for the first time in years, taking the train as I did back then. I stopped at the little store on the way back and wouldn't you know it, no Green Tea ice cream!  Still, I grabbed some Monkey Head and jumped back on the train into town.

いただきます!

Enjoy!