Blueberries and Malt?

Seems a strange combination, you might say. But I'm addicted to it and I blame it all on the King Arthur Flour Company and all those Dori Greenspan recipes out there featuring malted milk powder. Well, maybe there was only one Dori Greenspan recipe, but those Chocolate Malted Whopper Cookies sure got a lot of press! All the articles reminded me of how much I love malt and malted milkshakes-my absolutely favorite way of using ice cream in a dessert. Plus, I wanted to make the bagels featured in Peter Reinhart's great bread book, the Breadbakers Apprentice.

So I just went ahead and bought malted milk powder for dessert purposes and diastatic malt for bagel making. You can learn all about the differences between the two here. I couldn't find either of them at the grocery stores near me, so I popped onto the King Arthur Flour website, which I had never been on before, and ordered a pound of each. Since then I haven't made a single bagel (I will sometime, I promise), but I have discovered a new and gorgeous ice cream flavour combination.

Some of you may recall my penchant for making frozen yogurt with that already sweetened non-fat vanilla yogurt (organic of course) that you can find in most stores. Well, since I love all things ice-cream and am always looking for frozen treats that are low in saturated fat (no french custard creams in my house), it wasn't long before I started adding malt to my standard frozen yogurt recipe. At that point I had been making it with tiny frozen blueberries from Trader Joe's. These little blueberries (grown organically in Quebec) have much more flavour and less water in them than the huge ones you usually see, and they mixed deliciously with my vanilla frozen yogurt. But the addition of malted milk powder took the whole thing to a new level of yumminess-to the point where I eat some of this concoction almost every day for dessert.

This recipe is simplicity itself. All you need are:

2 cups of non-fat vanilla yogurt (if you want to use part or full-fat you are certainly welcome to do so)

1 cup of frozen blueberries (or you may use fresh if they are in season, but keep in mind that room temperature berries will cause the ice cream to take longer to churn-freezing or chilling them makes the most sense)

1/4 cup of malted milk powder (do NOT use chocolate malt powder- you want plain malted milk powder for this recipe)

1. Dump the yogurt in a bowl and thoroughly stir in the malted milk powder.

2. Place the mixture in your ice cream machine and turn it on.

3. When the mixture is partially frozen, add the blueberries. Churn until thick.

4. Be aware that because this is fat free, it will freeze completely solid if you don't use it within an hour or two. I usually just make it when I plan to eat it immediately. Plus, the flavour is best if the ice cream is served straight from the machine, when it is still at the soft-serve stage. If you want to keep the ice cream, try adding a couple tablespoons of vodka to the mixture while it is churning (vanilla flavoured vodka would be especially good). The alcohol will help prevent the yogurt from freezing solid even without any fat. If you use full fat vanilla yogurt, the fat may help prevent it from freezing hard, but I only make the fat-free version so I don't have any personal experience trying that out.

Give it a try and let me know what you think-am I crazy or is blueberry malt just a fabulous combination that will sweep the restaurants and recipe books of 2010?