“Salty?…No, sweet!”

Donald Duck

After talking with some friends about old videogames, I was hit with a sense of nostalgia, specifically for Kingdom Hearts, my favorite videogame when I was a child, which inspired me to make the game’s iconic sea salt ice cream. Words cannot describe how excited I was to make this. I bought a popsicle mold specifically for this purpose.

This is the part where I geek out.

There is a lot of personal childhood fondness I have for Kingdom Hearts. It will always be one of my first loves for videogames. I remember playing KH2 at home, sharing the PS2 controller with a friend. Dearly Beloved and Simple and Clean were some of the first songs I’ve transcribed on the piano as a kid. This game was my obsession when I was elementary/middle school.

One of the iconic foods from this series was sea salt ice cream with its characteristic bright blue color. When I first saw this treat in the games, I was curious but I, having been a person who had no desire to make anything and living in pre-Youtube-recipe-tutorial days, thought it was a fictional, unattainable treat. Until now. It has been close to fifteen years since I’ve played the series but I wanted to pay some homage to it after digging up my personal ice cream maker.

Okay, geeking out done.

So, my main references for making sea salt ice cream was from this recipe/video from Binging with Babish and Stella Parks’ recipe for Fior di Latte gelato.

From watching Binging with Babish’s video, he warns that making the typical ice cream custard base appears yellow from the egg yolks, which had an impact when the blue food coloring is added, making it appear more green. In order to avoid that, he suggested making fior di latte (Italian for “flower of milk”) gelato, which did not involve eggs and thus kept the natural white color. This then led me down the rabbit hole of the differences between gelato and ice cream.

Gelato vs Ice Cream

Gelato and ice cream are two well-known frozen desserts. “Gelato” is actually Italian for “ice cream.” However, it does has its key differences. This post from SeriousEats explains it pretty well but it essentially boils down to:

So yeah, gelato typically has no egg-yolks (but ice cream does), more milk than cream, typically less rich but more dense than ice cream, and has a softer/elastic texture compared to ice cream. For the flavor of fior di latte, this was the milk-flavored gelato.

Alright, back to ice cream

Since this recipe only came with so few ingredients, I decided to go the extra suggested step and toast the sugar before proceeding. Toasted sugar is like an elevated form of sugar. It is not something that is absolutely necessary but when given the chance, it can make a difference in the depth of flavor in any dessert when used in place of plain sugar. Unfortunately, this is still something I am trying to work out the kinks of. With a combination of uneven hot spots in the oven and being impatient with the process general, it is easy for me to accidentally melt sugar when I just wanted to toast it. Typically, the toasting process would take a few hours but I cut it short to 20 minutes since I was only working with a small amount of sugar.

Still somehow melted part of the sugar but I scraped what I could use, resulting in a mixture of 50:50 toasted:plain sugar. I have a suspicion that this works best in large batches over a gentle, slow process, insulated from hot spots, but I need to spend some time tuning this process.

Anyway, moving on, after whisking the sugar with cornstarch and 1/2 tsp of sea salt, I added some milk and let it simmer until everything came together and formed a gel-like consistency. I then removed the mixture from heat and added the rest of the milk and heavy cream, whisking until a uniform texture.

I added about 4 drops of blue food coloring until it resembled what was seen in the videogames then put the mixture through a strainer to collect any gelatinous bits that didn’t mix in properly.

Stella recommends chilling this base for a few hours before putting it into the ice cream maker but I was quite impatient, so I decided to go for it immediately and churning half of the base into the little ice cream maker.

Ah, regrets. This is why you need to listen to instructions because after twenty minutes, instead of seeing the soft serve consistency I expected, the base still remained liquidy. At this point, I thought, “Ah, screw it, and poured it into my popsicle mold anyway and thought to do better next time with the next round of gelato base.

Because the ice cream maker bowl had to be refrozen over 24 hours, I had to pick this up another day.

Except the bowl took forever to solidify. Almost frustratingly slow, since I know I couldn’t use it until it was frozen rock solid so that the base was churning at the right temperature. I was bewildered since I don’t remember freezing the bowl taking that long. I was even more confused when I noticed that the gelato bars that I already poured in the mold over the course of a few days still had some soft spots. I was trying to backtrack, wondering where I went wrong with the recipe.

It took me awhile to realize that it wasn’t me, it was the freezer that was surprisingly weak. After rearranging some stuff in the freezer that was blocking the cooling vents and cranking up the temperature setting from “cold” to “coldest”, I waited.

A few hours later, the ice cream maker bowl was frozen solid.

Bruuuuh.

After making the second round and being paranoid about cold temperatures not being cold enough, I left the bars in the fridge over the course of a couple of days.

Finally, it was ready. After first unsuccessfully removing the ice cream from the mold with a butter knife, I switched tactics by running the mold under warm water for 20 sec and slowly pulling out the popsicles out.

Bro.

My inner child would have had a meltdown upon seeing this. It felt so surreal seeing this in my hands, like a callback to my childhood.

The taste of this was quite good. In the words of Donald Duck, it was “salty…no sweet”. There was a nice uncomplicated, not too heavy milky taste with salty undertones to this. I think my roommate described the taste best–it tastes like the sea salt crema topping on boba, except in an ice cream form. I personally liked it.

One could even say that the taste was simple and clean.

Almost in a coincidental fitting way, I finished making this ice cream right before the end of summer (September 22nd is the Autumn Equinox). What a good way to say goodbye to summer before fall sets in.

…Looks like my summer vacation is over.