Peggy’s Ice Cream Stories – by Co-owner and Executive Chef, Rachel.
At Peggy’s, we put our heart and soul into our menus, creating fresh, seasonal food with local produce. For some restaurants, that doesn’t extend to the dessert menu, but not for us!
When we originally designed our menu, I looked at lots of commercial ice cream providers and found that some used more additives in their recipes that actual ingredients! That did not sit well with our passion for fresh food. Not wanting to give you, our customers, anything we wouldn’t want to eat ourselves, we bit the bullet and bought an ice cream maker.
There are absolutely no additives in our ice cream. We use only real and natural ingredients, no preservatives, no stabilisers, no fake flavours.
Our desire to give you the highest quality produce has actually become a fun challenge for our team. The chefs are constantly inventing new flavours – from saffron, wild berry, and rosemary and chocolate to boozy limoncello sorbets – just to name a few.
Alongside some unique flavours, we always try to keep a good stock of our well-loved staples like orange flower and cardamom, Peggy’s Malt and the beautiful rose, which takes me back to my childhood.
For those that don’t know, I grew up in Iran before the revolution. My Dad was a civil engineer, and his work took us there as a family when I was just two years old. We lived in the small village of Chizar, just ten miles north of Tehran. At the time of this culinary discovery in a small cafe in the village, political tensions were growing in Tehran. Pressure was intense for Dad as they completed the building of the telephone tower in Tehran. Mum was really missing home and family back in England; which combined with her failing mental health culminated in an almighty row between the two of them.
So, my lovely and quite mad Mum whisked me up and we stormed up the hill to this little cafe. She ordered ice cream for both of us: rose ice cream.
As if by magic, with each spoonful; all harsh and bitter feelings melted away as we were slowly and gently calmed and comforted by its perfume and sweet, velvety rich cream.
We left the cafe with no bitterness, no upset, tight feeling in our tummies and no lump in our throats – just a soft and quiet feeling of well-being.
Luckily you need not wait for a family row or political unrest to try this here at Peggy’s. While it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to eat flowers, I think it’s really special.
Peggy’s Malt, on the other hand, is one that I came up with for my son when he was young.
We were setting about to try and make some brown bread ice cream at home. We didn’t have a machine and as it turned out we didn’t have much brown bread either, so we improvised with what we could find close by.
Normally to make brown bread ice cream the recipe calls for a syrup and the addition of very dry breadcrumbs. You rehydrate the dry crumbs with extra sugary oomph, resulting in these strange but unctuous toffee-like chunks.
Of course, this proved surprisingly hard to do without the key ingredient, brown bread. We used what we had to hand, which was malt loaf. We toasted it until it was dry, crumbed it and added some Horlicks to the cream because, why not. We were already straying from the recipe, so why not stray further.
We had to constantly break up and churn the icy crystals with a fork or potato masher, over and over. Re-freeze. Churn. Repeat. For hours. It was a lot of work for something that might not, well, work. The result, somehow, on that day at home was inspiring enough for me to want to put it on our menu at Peggy’s.
I also knew that a machine was going to be an essential piece of kit that would make it easier and allow us to get the perfect light texture. The umami of the malt combined with the creamy milk and chewy malt toffee bits makes this a winner for young and older alike.
Trial and error, or just fantastic mistakes can sometimes result in something quite special. Many recipes that we take for granted have come about from scarcity or happy accidents, and here at Peggy’s it’s no exception. Everything is crafted with love and attention, and while you enjoy the final product, it’s worth keeping in mind the history, and the hours of research and development that goes behind each dish. Even down to something as simple as a scoop of ice cream.
