So I think
my newest goal is to make a thorough investigation of the island’s shave ice
and determine which one, truly, serves the best.
Made a visit
to Matsumoto’s up in Haleiwa with a friend earlier this week, and while it’s popular
and very tasty, it’s also always crowded with tourists, the benches outside
smell like garbage, and the staff is hit-or-miss on friendliness. I ordered a combination of lilikoi
(passionfruit – always present on my shave ice), coconut cream, and white
cake. The last two flavors were
virtually indistinguishable.
At Matsumoto’s,
you can get regular ol’ shave ice (not
a snowcone – it’s much finer, like real snow, and are almost always formed into
grapefruit-sized portions. But you can
also have them put ice cream under your ice.
Or sweet azuki beans under your ice.
Or both ice cream and
beans. I tried the beans once. Once was plenty. No beans in my shave ice any more – no ice cream,
either. Just pure ice. Almost everyone in line was getting sweetened
condensed milk poured on top. Not only
does it look weird, I’m just dubious about the fruity-ice-dairy combo. I don’t adore sherbet, barely tolerate ice
cream sodas, and am pretty sure I don’t want ice cream at the bottom of my
shave ice. But, others have told me it’s
delicious, so perhaps I need to give it a try, if nothing else but to say I
have (see also: beans).
There are
many other shave ice purveyors on O’ahu, however, and it’s time to start
discovering them.
Meanwhile, I
am rediscovering my home ice-shaver!
This is one of those gifts I wasn’t too sure I really needed or wanted,
but turned out to be pleasant surprises (see also: yogurt-maker). Anyhow, with milk fetching confiscatory
prices in Hawai’i, I might not be using my ice cream maker as much as I would
like. Ice, however, is cheap and
plentiful. The syrups, however, can get
a little pricey. I did find a store in
Pearl City that sells them for $1.99, but they’re full of high-fructose corn
syrup and preservatives (something I’m not too Michael-Pollan about, but if I
can avoid them, super). Surely I can
make my own. So I got on the google-box and started looking for snow-cone syrup
recipes. With pennies for the cost of
the sugar and Kool-Aid on sale for 10 cents a packet, this beats the
supermarket syrups by a long shot! And
it’s crazy-easy. I cranked out 5 batches
in just under 20 minutes, all for less than the price of one commercial syrup
bottle. I’ve been a fan of crushed and
shaved ice from the days of my Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine (which produced just a
Dixie cup of shaved ice after minutes of hand-cranking), so I’m easily
satisfied by a dessert of a bowl of snow flavored with a little sugar syrup.
Shave Ice Syrup
¾ c. water
¾ c. sugar
1 packet
Kool-Aid (unsweetened); 1 t. extract; half a dram bottle of flavoring
Boil the
water and sugar until the sugar dissolves. Remove from heat. Add flavoring and stir. Cool your syrups in the refrigerator, then
pour over shaved ice. Store in the refrigerator. (Chilled syrups don’t melt the
ice so quickly, anyhow.)
It’s essentially
just flavored simple syrup. And this
stuff is sweet and flavorful – which it needs to be, so the ice doesn’t water
it down too much.
For this
go-round, I made Grape, Strawberry, and Pink Lemonade with Kool-Aid; Vanilla
and Coconut with extracts. I used my
clear vanilla for this, but added a drop of neon blue food coloring to
distinguish it from coconut, which I tinted bright yellow-green.
Chemistry? No, sugar syrup!
Next up: Almond,
Cherry, Pineapple, and my favorite, Lilikoi (as soon as I can figure out the
proportions with my pre-sweetened passionfruit drink mix). Later: Maple, Banana, Lime, maybe a
vanilla-peppermint or an Earl Grey syrup?
Lemon-elderflower would be awesome, if only we had an Ikea here for the
elderflower. Maybe someday I can move
behind the candy-like esters of artificial flavoring and try reducing fruit
juices into syrups, but – oddly – that has an air of the inauthentic. Plus, those would surely taste cooked. All the more reason to keep with the Kool-Aid
and the extracts. :)
My most recent combo: vanilla-coconut
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