You either love Marmite or hate Marmite apparently, but I’m all like meh and don’t subscribe to any particular POV. However, as an Adventure Chef, I am all about experimentalistation so I was delighted when my fancy Chef friend Sonnda gave me a jar of the stuff to play with…
So, what’s inside the jar?
….and how’s it taste?
Very salty, very umami, a slightly bitter aftertaste, a fraction metallic or tasting like rust, and one other flavour I can’t identify (update: blood! It tastes a bit like blood!).
So, what to do with it? Well, after much thought I figure I’ll try and use it as to add an extra salty/umami dimension to something no one has added an extra salty/umami dimension to! And it can only mean one thing!
Marmite and chocolate ice cream!
I start by assembling a mighty army of relevant ingredients:
Sugar (75g please); Goody Cao Chocolate Paradise; single cream (150mls); skimmed milk (150mls); 3 egg yolks.
I start by heating the milk and cream in a sauce pan:
and I blend the egg yolks, sugar and Goody in a mixing bowl:
and at this point I lose the plot a little because I spy this across the room!
erm, cream cheese. My subconcious brain has told me this will work really well with the base and …er…stuff.
The next phase of my global quest for ice cream domination is to mix up the various combos:
Marmite and chocolate, cream cheese and chocolate, extra chocolate.
And it’s off to my professional chef’s kitchen freezer where I beat them periodically over the next 3 hours until they set.
Like this…!
And how do they taste?
I try the extra chocolate one first…perfect, super tasty! Pass. Next the cream cheese version….this is all right, it just makes the ice cream taste a bit sour; there’s also a slightly odd texture I don’t like and I think this is because it was nasty reduced-fat cheese. Marginal fail.
And last but by no means least, the Marmite one!
…
It is at once overpowering and inedible. Salty, sour, hideous, disgusting, offensive. All I can taste is stupid Marmite. Total fail.
BUT I CANNOT TAKE DEFEAT, SIRRAH!
So as an experiment I try ever decreasing amounts of the Marmite ice cream with the extra chocolate one and get to a point where it kinda works in so far as it adds an odd, metallic note to the chocolate flavour and this is not by any means inedible. And just because I can, and as a final experiment, I mix up all three together and smear it all over the walls of my professional chef’s kitchen dancing all the while to early Brittney Spears videos.
Cough…
In summary, I think Marmite could maybe work as a very subtle accent to a sweet dish but it would need lots of experimentation to get right eg with fruits/sorbet etc but maybe that’s something you could have a go at?
If that’s the case, I’d love to hear about your exploits over at the Facebook page!
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And occasionally Huffy
