Sammy Fredo

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Meet the sixth member from the famous family of smooth operators (sauces and creams). And be amazed by a character completely out of the ordinary (with Ingredient Special on Basil, Rcp# 73).

Ingredients for ‘Sammy Fredo’

  • 1 tablespoon dried hibiscus blossoms
  • 3 – 4 fresh rosemary needles (or a knife tip of dried and cut rosemary).
  • 50g peeled and thinly sliced sweet potatoes
  • 50g peeled, pre-cooked and then frozen maroni (6-7 maroni)
  • 100g frozen Hokkaido pumpkin flesh, without peel, fuzzy parts, or seeds
  • 150g frozen overripe bananas (without peel, not too dark).
  • 75 – 100 fresh basil leaves, preferably red basil, washed and pre-frozen
  • 300ml hot water

Preparations for ‘Sammy Fredo’

  1. Boil over the hibiscus blossoms and the rosemary needles (both put together in a tea bag) with 300ml hot water in a pot, heat up to bring to a brief boil, then turn off and let stand for 10 minutes with the tea bag in the pot.
  2. Take out the tea bag from the pot, and add the sweet potato slices. Heat up the pot again and briefly bring to a boil, then lower the heat and add frozen maroni and frozen pumpkin flesh. Let simmer low for 10-15 minutes, until the sweet potato slices are soft.
  3. Take the bananas out of the freezer and place them in a bowl in the fridge.
  4. Remove all hard residue in the pot with maroni, pumpkin, and sweet potato, and let cool down to hand temperature in the pot.
  5. Pour the mix into a clean, tall blender bowl and blend. Then, let cool down further until room temperature and blend again together with the half frozen peeled bananas (from the fridge).
  6. Put the cream into the freezer for an hour. After that, take it out and stir it with a fork to break up any ice lumps and get an even, icy mix. Put the cream back into the freezer for another 30 – 40 minutes, and repeat the stirring with the fork. You should get an even, half-frozen cream (hence “semi-freddo,” as in half-frozen).
  7. Serve with fresh berries of the season or a fruit sauce!

If you do not need the half-frozen cream right after you make it, go through the steps from 1, 2, and 4, and put the cream without the banana into the fridge in a box with a lid (for up to a day is okay). When you want to serve it, take it out of the fridge and blend in the half-frozen banana. Proceed with Step 6. So, if you want to split the preparation process, you are going to need all the ingredients ready (meaning the semi-frozen peeled bananas and the half finished cream) about two hours before serving.

Side Notes:

  1. And here are the other members of the funky clan: [The Sauce Brothers] and [Cousin Herb]. Go on and have a groovy summer!
  2. Here, it is important that the overripe bananas you are using are not too dark because they get a caramel note then, which works really well with everything dark, like chocolate creams, etc. Resist the urge to make this more sweet or more sour; combine the parfait with berries, and the real taste spectrum of the basil unfolds.
  3. We are pre-freezing the ingredients here to lower the cooking time and prolong the time the cream is edible after preparation. Also, especially the maroni will blend better into the mass and be more creamy after they are not only pre-cooked, but also pre-frozen. I think it has something to do with the fact that, by freezing the chestnuts after pre-cooking, the water inside them is reduced, and mostly fats, proteins, and emulsifiers are left, basically what you are looking for when you use dairy and want to make a cream or an ice cream.

Please note: For all my recipes (text) on this blog (By MagS, Parsley-Lane Blog) I grant a CC license under the terms of BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). For further explanations, please see the Legal Notice or visit creativecommons.org.