Mango-Habanero Vegan Ice Cream: A Culinary Odyssey

This story probably begins in Cuba, with its penchant for citrusy hot sauces. From there we to the Veranda restaurant in North Miami, where chef Robbin Haas develops this cool mango-habanero chile sauce.. Mark Kiffin, once head chef at the Coyote Cafe, adapts this sauce and gives in a distinct southwestern spin in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The adapted recipe then gets picked up by Mark Miller for a favorite of mine, The Great Chile Cookbook, which I buy in the early 2000s when my son, daughter, and I take a cooking class while on vacation in Santa Fe. The book travels back with us to Tel Aviv, where it eventually becomes a mainstay of my Etzlenu Kitchen. From there, it’s just a small step to close the circle when my Germany-based daughter comes here for a recent visit and does a hot sauce tasting taste, which includes our mango-habanero bbq sauce. . Let’s tease this story out a bit from more or less its endpoint.

My daughter and I are sitting out on the balcony having a late dinner. She is interested in some of the various vegan hot sauces I had been making (she’s a vegan) and so I brought out a handful for her to sample. She liked most of them a lot (jury still out on the tamarind-chipotle sauce), but zeroed in on the Mango-Habanero.. “That,” she said, “ would make a killer ice cream.” And so there I was the next morning, blending homemade cashew milk with cocoa butter, coconut cream, and my Mango-Habanero sauce together in preparation for the joint dinner we would be cooking that night.

As of this writing, I have no idea how this dish is going to turn out. It is sitting in the freezer as we speak, slowly taking on the consistency of sorbet. I can tell you that so far, it’s pretty amazing, and that’s just from licking the bowl. How it will play out, we’ll just have to see. But the result to me is secondary. It’s the social interaction or interactions across a time continuum that fascinate me, from Cuba to south Florida to Santa Fe to Tel Aviv — at the very center of which is a very special collaborative dinner with my very special, innovative daughter. And that, to my mind, is what really good food is all about.