Have you ever tried ice cream… with a tea flavour?… Not an ice lolly, but proper ice cream. Both tea in all its varieties and herbal infusions can be used as basic ingredients in the preparation of ice creams and custards. It’s a flavour you’ll find more and more often in ice cream parlours; in fact, Gelato University, an internationally renowned school, has included a course dedicated to the use of tea and herbal infusions in ice cream-making as part of its curriculum. This trend is actually less recent than you might think, as we’ll see in a few lines’ time in our in-depth feature. But first, let’s see how to make a delicious homemade tea-flavoured ice cream.

How to make tea ice cream

Whilst browsing the internet, particularly on social media, you’ve no doubt come across photos and videos of bowls of matcha tea ice cream, with its bright green colour and inviting appearance. Japanese green tea ice cream was among the first to gain popularity, but as mentioned at the start, ice cream can be made using any type of tea; matcha has a slightly more intense flavour than the others. You can make your own tea ice cream at home too; you don’t need an ice cream maker – simply place the mixture in the freezer, taking care to stir it vigorously every 30 minutes until you achieve the desired consistency.

Ingredients
The quantities given are enough to make about 6 portions of ice cream:

- 500ml single cream
- 1 cup of your favourite tea
- 4 egg yolks
- 100g sugar
- 250ml whole milk

Method
Heat the milk and half the sugar in a small saucepan, without bringing it to the boil; separately, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining 50 g of sugar. Combine the milk and the egg yolks, stirring constantly (be careful of the temperatures), and return the mixture to the heat, cooking over a moderate heat until it begins to thicken. At this point, you can add your tea infusion. The final ingredient to add, before transferring the mixture to the freezer, is the whipped cream (please note: before adding it, the cream made with milk and egg yolks must have cooled completely). If you follow a vegan diet, you can make your own tea ice cream by replacing the animal-derived ingredients with coconut milk and cornflour.

Tea ice cream at Queen Victoria’s court

As mentioned at the start, tea ice cream is not a recent fad; in fact, this combination appears in a recipe book published in 1862, written by Charles Elmé Francatelli, a British chef of Italian origin who was head chef at Queen Victoria’s court.