Nuts On Ice Cream

For the last few months I've been trying to write an article about how to best enjoy nuts.  I've been thinking about all of the ways and treats nuts are presented with.  The problem I've had writing this article is which kind of nut should I use for this experiment. Then it crossed my mind, I should first pick out my favorite nut toping and then focus on what to mix it with.  So I decided that I would do a taste test with a simple yet high quality vanilla ice cream.  I'll sample 5 different nuts on the ice cream and decide which nut makes the best toping.  The 5 nuts I choose to experiment with are walnuts, almonds, peanuts, pistachios, and hazelnuts.

The first nut I tried with the ice cream was peanut.  I should mention that these peanuts were salted peanuts.  For those that have never tried ice cream with salted peanuts I recomend it highly.  The nice roasted flavour of the peanut was strong enough to cut through the vanilla flavour of the ice cream, but it didn't overpower.  The texture of the peanut is relatively soft compared to many nuts so it didn't really have a great "crunch" but instead it's almost a vegetable crunch.  I guess that's why they're not nuts but legumes.

The next nut I tried was the walnut.  It too has a softer texture like the peanut, but the flavour is much more subtle.  I only sprinkled a little on my scoop of vanilla ice cream and frankly the flavour was almost totally lost.  It's not that it doesn't go well on deserts, it just has to be really amplified to work well.  I think if you want walnut to work you either have to load it up to a high degree with walnut or ad walnut flavour to the ice cream.

The next nut I tried was almonds.  Almonds had a great crunch to them but the flavour, like the walnut, was really subtle.  I think even if you increased the almond flavour, either by adding more or by flavouring the ice cream with almond, it still wouldn't work as well as it might with peanuts or even walnuts.  The almond flavour seems to work really well in baked goods, but in ice cream I have yet to be convinced of its superiority.

Hazel nuts are the next nut in the line.  With the hazel nut you have a great texture and the flavour is somewhere between walnuts and peanuts in strength.  In this case I'm wondering if the flavour would have worked better with a chocolate ice cream, since that's traditionally what is paired with hazelnuts.

The final nut I used to flavour my ice cream was the pistachio.  Now this is a nut that has a really unique flavour.  It's not that it doesn't work well with the ice cream, it just creates a completely new flavour that some might not enjoy.  I didn't mind it, but I also love pistachios.  Strangely I often really hate most pistachio ice creams.  I think for the pistachio to work with ice cream it has to be as a garnish rather than the focus.  I could also see many problems with mixing this with other flavours of ice cream, in particular anything fruity.

I have to say that at the end of the day I preferred the peanuts on my ice cream.  The flavour adds a nice roasted flavour and the texture works fairly well.  That's not to say that I won't ever go with other nuts in the future, in fact with some fancier ice cream flavours, other nuts might work a little better.

CC