Aotearoa and Australia · Volume 04, The Roast, the Dairy and the Corner Shop
Hokey pokey ice cream
New Zealand
Illustration
- Time
- 8 hours
- Researched
- 8 sources cited
"Hokey pokey" has meant honeycomb toffee in New Zealand since the late nineteenth century, though the word's own origin is genuinely uncertain, a corruption of "hocus pocus," an echo of Italian street-vendor cries, or inherited ice-cream-seller slang. Ice-cream maker Brian Simon says he first put hokey pokey into ice cream in 1953 at his father's Dunedin factory, using broken Crunchie bar; Tip Top's own reformulation around 1980, switching from mixed-through toffee to small honeycomb balls, made the flavour genuinely national.
As tradition built it
Serves 6. Frozen overnight.
Ingredients
The hokey pokey
- 4 tbsp white sugar
- 2 tbsp golden syrup
- 1 tsp baking soda
The ice cream
- 4 egg yolks
- 240ml caster sugar
- 500ml full fat cream
Method
The hokey pokey
- Line a flat baking tray with non-stick baking paper.
- Put the sugar and golden syrup in a large, wide pot over a low heat. Stir constantly until it comes to the boil.
- Simmer five minutes over a very gentle heat, stirring now and then so it does not burn.
- Take it off the heat, add the baking soda and stir quickly until it froths.
- Pour it at once onto the tray and leave it to cool. Break it into rough chunks when cold.
The ice cream
- Beat the caster sugar and egg yolks with an electric mixer until pale and creamy.
- Whip the cream to soft peaks in another bowl.
- Fold the yolk mixture gently into the cream, then stir through the hokey pokey.
- Pour into a two litre container with a tight lid and freeze overnight, or until firm.
Notes
The recipe is Chelsea Sugar's, New Zealand's sugar and golden syrup company. It is a no-churn ice cream, and neither it nor Geoff Scott's hokey pokey in the NZ Herald, which boils 5 tbsp of sugar with the syrup 3 minutes, uses a thermometer.
What a modern chef changes
Feijoa-fold honeycomb, in two textures
This chapter's own technique work, extending Rung 4.
Method
- Take the toffee to a slightly lower final temperature and fold through a feijoa purée before pouring to set, giving the honeycomb a genuinely New Zealand-specific fruit note rather than the plain golden syrup flavour alone. Rung 4.
- Shatter the set toffee into a fine dust rather than chunks for part of the batch, folding it through at the very end of churning so it partially dissolves into a caramel ribbon rather than staying as discrete pieces throughout.
- Dehydrate a thin feijoa slice separately for a crisp garnish shard, echoing the fruit's own season rather than serving the ice cream plain.
Notes
No New Zealand source documents a chef-driven elevated hokey pokey; this is our own extension of the Technique Ladder's sugar chemistry.