Cereal Milk Ice Cream

I can count the number of pastry chefs I can name on one hand, so it must be safe to say that Christina Tosi is a culinary genius. I’ve never even been to New York and I’m not even much into sweets and I know more about the Momofuku Milk Bar than most restaurants here in Montreal. I first heard about the cereal milk ice cream in passing, a signature soft serve item there, and thought it was an interesting idea. I vowed to try out when I first obtained an ice cream machine and then promptly shelved the idea, referring to how it was meant to be my first flavor in every ice cream related post thereafter.

If you were to have asked me at that time, I would’ve thought it would be nothing more complicated than simply making a custard out of residual milk from a cereal bowl. It really should be as simple as that, shouldn’t it? I stumbled upon this recipe through David Lebovitz and that idea went awry. The pictures were gorgeous and the recipe sounded official and that meant I had to trust it over my gut. So I made this recipe instead of trying to create my own.

It would be wrong to say that it doesn’t produce a good ice cream, because it does, it just does it in a horribly inefficient manner. The main reason for this is that it derives the cereal milk flavor from a large quantity of “cornflake crunch” (basically a cornflake granola) – which uses a stick and a half of butter and almost an entire box of cereal that are later simply thrown away. This is soaked in a liter of milk that is later awkwardly squeezed out of a soggy cereal mess to amount to a scant cup. The cornflake crunch topping makes sense, its usage as a flavoring ingredient does not. From my consumer perspective with supermarket prices, it adds (cost of a box of cereal, three cups of wasted milk and the butter) something like $9 to the ingredient cost just to infuse that milk. For a pint of ice cream to cost more than $10 to make did not seem logical.

I made a few revisions, churned up my alternate and presented both ice creams to my neighbors and their children as my blind tasting guinea pigs. They actually thought my cereal milk ice cream had more cereal flavor than the original recipe. Their little girl, who doesn’t even like ice cream, ate quite a bit of it. There was a small issue in that I used sweeter cereals than the original corn flakes and forgot to compensate by a reduction of sugar in the custard, but I have corrected that in the recipe I will share with you, should you choose to attempt it at home.

With many thanks to Cafe Fernando for a fantatic post that got me to finally make this flavor, here’s what I did to modify the recipe to be more economical, evidently more flavorful and less of a headache.

1. I vastly reduced the quantity of milk and cereal and the ratio of cereal to milk. It didn’t seem conducive to concentrating flavor, but went beyond the concentration point, wasting several potential breakfasts.
2. Without knowing what cereal would be used in Momofuku’s ice cream, corn flakes would not be my first choice. The defining flavor of cereal milk is some sort of harmony of milled grains and refined sugar that seemed better defined by more guilty pleasure cereals. A bonus of cereals like Captain Crunch or Corn Pops is that they still retain their shape when they become soggy and are far easier to strain out of the milk.
3. I eliminated the crunch ingredients that were essentially thrown away unutilized. That means the butter and some of the sugar. I kept the milk powder though, as it definitely helps to bolster the texture and flavor.

That’s it really. The rest of the recipe was just a basic custard base. I was originally planning on toasting the cereal in a dry skillet to try and bring out some of its “cerealiness” but after attempting this it didn’t seem to be making a huge difference. So in the sake of honesty this was an omitted step in the recipe below, but I don’t believe it all that important. I did, however, toast the milk powder, which was referred to as the “MSG of baked goods” in the original recipe, which likely makes a difference.

MY Cereal Milk Ice Cream

• 2 cups whole milk
• 3.5 ounces (105g) guilty pleasure cereal (Captain Crunch, Corn Pops, Frosted Flakes, etc.), lightly crushed
• 2 ounces (60g) skim milk powder, toasted
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 egg yolks, room temperature
• 1 cup heavy cream

1. Combine the milk and cereal in a large, flat container to ensure that all cereal comes in contact with the milk. Let sit until cereal softens, then strain in a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth into a clean bowl. This will yield approximately 1 cup of cereal milk.
2. Heat the cereal milk with skim milk powder, sugar, salt and vanilla in a pot over medium heat, stirring occasionally until it just begins to boil.
3. Place the egg yolks in a large bowl and whisk lightly. Remove the milk from the heat and whisk a few tablespoons of it into the egg yolks to temper them. Slowly incorporate the remaining milk into the egg yolks, then transfer everything back into the pot.
4. Return the pot to the heat and cook, stirring often, until thickened. Strain immediately into a clean bowl, mix with heavy cream and cover with plastic wrap directly against the surface to prevent a film from forming. Refrigerate for at least four hours before churning in an ice cream machine.

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