Chicklets

I should have seen it coming.

I should have known that my gum-hating wife would hate any ice cream that had chewing gum in it.

For me, as ever, it wasn’t about the gum so much as nostalgia for pre-teen flavors. In this case it was an old Baskin-Robbins ice cream that brought together two great childish treats: ice cream and chewing gum.

That was before Ben and Jerry’s and Cold Stone Creamery and all the other big business frozen desserts came along. The MBA mindset was still in its earliest stages. CEO compensation had not even gotten to the mountaintops, let alone the stratospheric levels of today. Ice cream was still a local thing. Baskin-Robbins was just a small chain of ice cream parlors known as “31 Flavors.”  In those days, 31 flavors was what passed for extravagant.

And for a kid, extravagant was (is) good.

Pre-adolescent fantasies always centered around having more stuff. I remember drawing an idealized boat in 7^th grade, a boat I expected to own one day. It had lots of guns and James Bond devices, of course. I was in middle school after all. It also had a TV room with a whole wall covered with screens, one for each channel. This was before cable so there wasn’t all that much programming available, but that wasn’t the point.

For a pre-teen, it was always about having more. That was what Halloween was really about—accumulation. Candy was the only currency we really understood and so on the night of nights we would empty the candy from our pillow cases (bags were too unreliable) and start counting our winnings. It was all there: candy bars, tootsie rolls, tootsie pops, sweet-tarts, candy corn, hard candy, taffy and, yes, bubble gum.

Double Bubble was what people typically handed out, which was disappointing, because the good stuff was Bazooka.

Each piece of gum had a little comic strip inside the Bazooka wrapper but the comics, although very droll in an early middle school kind of way, were not the main draw. What was great about Bazooka was the taste.

And somehow that’s what I captured with this ice cream.

During the mixing process, I added some grenadine to turn the custard pink before I froze it, but somehow that addition turned the ice cream into my favorite chewing gum. I also added some chicklet-style gum to round out the recipe because that’s what Baskin-Robbins had done, but that didn’t add much one way or the other.

Frozen gum doesn’t chew very well right off the bat. The ice cream was good, though, very good. My wife may dispute that, but she’s entitled to her opinion, wrong though it may be.

Pink Bubble Gum Ice Cream

(about 2 quarts)
1 ½ cups milk
¾ cup sugar
2 T flour
A few grains salt
2 eggs or 3 yolks (pasteurized, if possible, see note)
1 ½ cups cream
2 T grenadine
½ cup chicklet style chewing gum

1. Blend milk with sugar, flour and salt, and heat to 180-190ºF stirring frequently until thick, cover for 10 minutes.
2. Beat eggs and add ½ cup of mixture while beating, then add eggs to mixture.

HEALTH NOTE:     Since you’re dealing with eggs here, you need to take care when cooking the custard. Too much cooking and the custard gets lumpy, too little and you risk salmonella.  Another alternative is to use pasteurized eggs.

1. Heat the mixture for one minute over medium, then cool with plastic wrap or wax paper pressed onto the top of the mixture to keep it from developing a skin. Cool for several hours or overnight.
2. Add the cream to the custard, stir in grenadine and chewing gum then add everything to the ice cream freezer and freeze for 30 to 35 minutes.
3. Put the frozen ice cream into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it a chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Chicklets,” photographed by the author. 

I’m not a gum connoisseur by any means, but I have my favorites. I particularly liked Adams sour gum growing up as well as Freshen Up. I didn’t care much for Black Jack licorice flavored gum. There was also hot dog bubble gum, blow pops and later on bubble yum which was the closest thing to Bazooka although it felt a lot more rubbery. What was your favorite gum.  Let me know in a comment.