Veda Bread Ice Cream

July is a hot month back home in Belfast. Not especially due to the weather, but because of the slightly heightened feeling on the streets due to the Orange Order marches held in what is known as the Twelfth Fortnight. This was the traditional summer holiday for the shipyard workers in the city and a chance to hark back and remember Catholics and Protestants knocking the pan out of each other at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. For those of us who don’t enjoy some light civil disobedience, it’s a good time to potter around at home doing all those things you’d sort of meant to do all year since you can’t really go out. Or ignore them completely and spend time watching box-sets and eating ice cream instead…

Feeling oddly left out here in London, I thought I would try and join in with a ice cream recipe with a taste of home. I’ve been wanting to make a traditional brown bread ice cream since I got my ice cream maker earlier this year, but the arrival of my mother on the week of the Twelfth with every Northern Irish exile’s request in the shape of a loaf of Veda bread, meant I decided to give it an Ulster twist and use Veda instead.

A dark delicious slightly sticky (non-fruited) malt bread, Veda makes the best toast in the world, marrying together with butter like nobody’s business. Adding sugar to bring out the natural sweetness and crisping it up with butter is what my life has been missing up until now. Using this recipe by David Lebovitz, I crumbled the Veda into smallish pieces, fried off in butter and a good unrefined caster sugar and then toasted in the oven for about 30 minutes or until I had clusters of crispy, sticky, malty heaven that were so good, I could have skipped the ice cream and just eaten them alone.

But since I had promised ice cream, I made ice cream. The recipe uses a basic custard, but with the addition of cream cheese to stop it all being just too sweet. This is much more faffy, needing a third bowl, more counter space, a sieve, a whisk and more potential for the custard to curdle as it needs to be hotter to melt the cream cheese, so in future, I don’t think I’ll bother with this addition. Otherwise, it was all pretty straightforward.

I gave this ice cream a bit of a Brixton twist and added a slug of dark rum, some vanilla and then stirred the caramalised crisped up Veda into the churned mixture about five minutes before the end. Because the Veda is stickier and maltier than regular brown bread, the crumbs clumped up more and made huge nuggets of crispiness. Fearing that I would either break my teeth or the machine, I blitzed them in the blender to make them more crumb like. Everything then went in the freezer for a couple of hours to firm up and create hands down the finest ice cream ever created.

Creamy beyond belief but crunchy and chewy due to the crisped up bread crumbs and with a slightly grown up flavour from the rum, this was just magnificient. Rich with butter and with a gorgeous toffee feel, I defy you not to fall in love with this amazing ice cream and want to sneak a spoonful everytime you pass the freezer. It was declared even better than the Northern Irish ice cream institution that is Maud’s Pooh Bear Delight*.

You need to make this ice cream immediately. If you don’t have access to Norn Iron’s best kept secret, try it with some Soreen or a really good brown bread instead. This is what breadcrumbs aspire to being…

*Youse know it’d be belter in a poke.

15 replies
  1. Chloe
    Chloe says:

    OMG, that looks insanely good!! As does the Veda bread, not heard of that over here before.

    I feel like the world is conspiring to make me buy an ice cream machine. This ice cream would be a good reason.

    And I do believe candied bacon might make a sneaky addition to this if I were to make it…

  2. Mister North
    Mister North says:

    Holy smokes… I am seething with jealousy as I read this. You can’t get some sent up on the train for me, can you?

    Seriously, we need to try to bake Veda bread next, if there’s nowhere else to source it on this uncivilised island 🙂

  3. Mister North
    Mister North says:

    Hmm, Soreen’s a wee bit more dense, but I reckon that would be worth investigating. Purely for scientific reasons, of course 😉

  4. Miss South
    Miss South says:

    Chloe, you will not regret getting an ice cream maker. Mine actually isn’t that bulky and wasn’t expensive at all and I LOVE it…

    Mister North, I cannot guarantee I can keep you any, but technically there is some in the freezer going spare right now. Be quick. Although I anticipate a fight not seen between us since the suitcase in the car days of childhood! I like your idea about baking Veda, but having seen this recipe http://teandwheatenbread.blogspot.com/2010/10/malt-loaf-veda-bread.html I’d rather just get visitors to bring the odd loaf!

    Miss Cay, any chance those Irish loving Liverpudlians have a secret source of Veda somewhere?

    Meemalee, it’s Soreen. It has to be good. There is no such thing as bad Soreen!

  5. grania @ crumbs for dinner
    grania @ crumbs for dinner says:

    this looks AMAZING. i almost licked my computer screen for a sneaky taste.

    i’ll have to file this under “incentives to get a proper fridge/freezer when i move house” – with our current miniature ice-tray & vodka bottle sized one, there’s nowhere to store any ice cream.

    either that or i’ll bribe someone to make it for me. a much better idea!

  6. thelittleloaf
    thelittleloaf says:

    This looks so utterly incredible I want to eat ice cream for breakfast as I read it! I’d never heard of Veda bread but it sounds amazing. I recently got an ice cream maker so going to give this a go – hopefully Soreen will taste almost as good 🙂

  7. The Tiffin Box
    The Tiffin Box says:

    Very excited to have just discovered this recipe! As a fellow Northern Irelander (now living in Scotland) I too adore Veda and look forward to the deliveries brought over by visitors from home! This ice cream def looks like it’s worth sacrificing my next loaf for! I had a go at making pumpernickel bread (http://thetiffinbox.com/WordPress/pumpernickel-bread/) from the Great British Bake Off recipe a while back and it tasted similar to Veda, but unfortunately isn’t the real thing!

  8. Miss South
    Miss South says:

    Not to toot my own horn, but people do go weak at the knees about this ice cream so yes, I’d say worth donating your next loaf for. You may not want to share though.

    Your pumpernickel bread really deserved that beautiful bread tag. It is swoonworthy! I wonder if you added malt extract could you Veda it up?

  9. The Tiffin Box
    The Tiffin Box says:

    Ohh, good idea, I’ll give it a go! I can see why people go weak at the knees – I have and I haven’t even tasted it yet! Your pictures are great. Thanks again, look forward to giving this one a go!

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