Ice cream & wine and dine experience

Today's course has been very relaxing. Nothing much to do then to sample ice cream, wine and desserts. 

Mr Robert Verweij did the workshop today and he started off with ice cream. He talked about the ingredients for making ice cream and gave us his recipe for this very tasty yogurt lemon ice cream made from scratch. He has this fancy ice cream maker that doesn't require a freezing element that you will have to freeze in the freezer first, but his freezes it on the spot. If I would be making a lot more ice cream I probably would purchase one too, but for now my little ice cream maker (including the freezing element) will do just fine. His yogurt ice cream was so good we all wrote down the recipe:

- 140 gr sugar

- 100 gr whipping cream

- 260 gr yogurt

- 1 teaspoon lemon zest

This would make about 500 grams of ice cream. It was quite easy. He put all the ingredients together and turned on the ice cream maker. It took about 15-20 minutes before we could sample the ice. It was soooo good!

While he was talking about everything related to making ice cream Joris made some vanilla ice cream in the back using egg yolks. This ice cream of course has a different texture and I much more preferred the yogurt ice since the vanilla ice cream was a bit to eggy for me. 

After lunch it was time for the wine and dine. First we talked about taste. We had to describe taste. This was quite funny as sometimes taste is just a fact and other times it's someones opinion. 

After all that it was time for some wine tasting. I rarely drink alcohol and I never learned how to appreciate wine. The only wines I like are the sweet dessert wines so it was my lucky day. 

We started with a sweet white wine (Tokaji Pajzos) paired with a ginger lemon ice cream. I think I was too busy eating the ice cream so I don't have a picture of that. 

The next wine was a sparkling sweet red wine (Borgo Maragliano Piemonte Brachetto). The dish that went with the wine was some kind of mouse with a raspberry sauce. The mouse alone tasted quite bland comparing to the wine, but with the sauce it was doable. 

Then it was time for another white wine (Monbazillac). The little cake was a speculoos apple cake. I don't remember if it went well together or not, but if I look at my notes it looks like they paired ok. 

The next wine was a red port (Krohn Porto Colheita 2002). We were suppose to taste it with some blue molted cheese, but since I don't eat cheese I only drank the port. 

The last wine was a sherry (Pedro Ximenez). The sherry is the glass on the right. The color is slightly more red then the port, which is more brown. 

Obviously the chocolate lava cake was the big star.It was AMAZING!

I never had a wine tasting before and I have to say it was quite fun. Normally you will have to spit out the wine, but I poured just a sip or two in my class so I drank it all. No need to waste good wine. Out of all the five wines I liked the sweet sparkling red wine the most.