It's Time for Ice Cream!

Another summer holiday weekend, another post about homemade ice cream. It's becoming a little predictable, no?! But, hey...it's a post! I had really good intentions about hitting you (the 5 readers I have left) with a bunch of posts this weekend. Posts with breakfast ideas for the long weekend, our recent trip to Paris (!) and thoughts about pregnancy as I enter my third (!!!!) trimester.

Well, you know what they say about good intentions.

The truth is, after the craziness of the last month and the craziness that is to come in the next few months, I really needed a break-- a three day weekend with no feelings of obligation. Just rest, relaxation and doing things that I felt like doing. Things like making homemade ice cream.

Previous ice cream posts have focused on seasonal fruit, but this time around we decided to do something different. I was having a hard time making up my mind about what kind of ice cream to make, so I let Jason be in the driver's seat. We perused our ice cream bible, and he picked out a recipe for tin roof ice cream, a traditional custard-based vanilla ice cream with fudge ripple and a chocolate-covered peanut mix in. I was in! We ended up foregoing the chocolate-covered peanuts-- our local grocery store is "temporarily closed" (no word on why or when it will be reopening) and we were surprised to discover that the Trader Joe's near our house does not carry such confections. So we ended up with a fudge ripple ice cream which was just as delicious.

It's going to be a good summer!

Fudge Ripple Ice Cream
Adapted slightly from David Lebovitz

Ingredients
3/4 cup whole milk
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup heavy cream
pinch of salt
1/2 vanilla bean
4 large egg yolks
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
Fudge Ripple (recipe below)

1. Warm the milk, sugar, salt and 1/2 cup of cream in a medium saucepan. Add vanilla bean to hot milk mixture. Remove from heat, cover, and let steep for 30 minutes.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk the 4 egg yolks and set aside. Pour remaining cream in a large bowl; place a metal strainer over top of the large bowl and set aside.
3. Rewarm the vanilla mixture. Once warm, slowly add to egg yolks whisking constantly (so as to avoid scrambled eggs). Pour mixture back into the saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pan, until mixture coats back of the spatula or spoon.
4. Pour through the metal strainer into the cream. Remove vanilla bean from the strainer, wipe off any bits of egg, and add back to mixture. Add vanilla extract. Chill over an ice bath. Refrigerate until cold (I let mine stay in there overnight but a few hours will probably do the trick).
5. Freeze in an ice cream freezer. When transferring to another container, alternate layers of fudge ripple and ice cream (don't stir together). Freeze until hard/ready to eat. Enjoy!

Fudge Ripple
From David Lebovitz

Ingredients:
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup water
6 TBL cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1. Whisk together sugar, corn syrup, water and cocoa powder in a medium saucepan. Heat over medium and bring to a low boil, whisking often.
2. Boil for 1 minute, remove from heat and stir in vanilla.
3. Let cool. Refrigerate until ready for ice cream. Make sure it is cold when you mix it in to the ice cream.

Strawberry Week, part 3

It would be pretty impossible for me to come home with three quarts of strawberries and not make some kind of ice cream. Rather than the relatively straightforward strawberry ice cream I made last year, I decided to try something I had seen a few weeks ago on The Kitchn--strawberry cheesecake ice cream. This recipe is a take on a recipe from the fabulous David Lebovitz and is wonderful in it simplicity and its tangy cheesecake flavor. You could add in any fruit--raspberries, blueberries, cherries, even cranberries would be delicious.

Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream
Inspired by The Kitchn and adapted from David Lebovitz

Ingredients:
8 ounces softened cream cheese
1 cup light sour cream
1 lemon, zested
1/2 cup half-and-half
2/3 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
1 cup small diced strawberries

1. Cut cream cheese into small pieces. Add cream cheese, lemon zest, sour cream, sugar, half-and-half, and salt into a blender or food processor. Puree until smooth.
2. Freeze it in your ice cream maker according to instructions. About five minutes before the ice cream is complete, add in diced strawberries. 
3. Transfer to an air tight container and place in your freezer until ready to serve. 

I Scream, You Scream...

When trying to decide what to do with our massive strawberry haul, the first thing that came to my mind was ice cream. When I was growing up we usually made homemade ice cream a couple times during the summer, usually for July 4th or Memorial Day, and it almost always involved strawberries. My mom would make the base from egg yolks, milk/cream, vanilla, and sugar, and we would slice strawberries until our hands turned pink from all the juices. Then I would watch my dad get the machine ready to go. We had one of those electric ice cream makers that made a gallon of ice cream at a time, and required ice and rock salt so we had to do it in the garage. It was quite the production and we treated it as such. Usually a pound cake was made to go with the ice cream and neighbors were often invited over to partake of its creamy, fruity goodness. Our ice cream always tasted better than what you could buy in the store. Or at least that’s how I remember it. (PS Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!)

When it came time to create our wedding registry last year, I was adamant about including an ice cream maker on the list. We chose one of the smaller versions that do not require ice or salt. You simply place the bowl in the freezer overnight and pour in the ice cream mix and the machine does all the work. Today was the first time we used it together (I made some chocolate sorbet once last fall by myself to surprise Jason with when he came home from being gone one weekend with mixed results) and I was really excited to try my hand at the strawberry ice cream I remembered so fondly from my youth.

I consulted David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop (which I bought for myself not long after the wedding in anticipation of using our new ice cream maker at some point in the  future) for a recipe and much to my surprise, his strawberry ice cream did not require eggs!  Apparently, there are multiple styles of ice cream—French-style ice cream uses a custard base made with egg yolks while Philadelphia-style ice cream is made with cream (and sometimes milk) but no eggs.  Most of David Lebovitz’s fruit-based ice cream recipes use the Philadelphia-style since he thinks is preferable to “let the flavor the fruits come forward without all the richness” of the French-style.  Even thought it was not the custard-base ice cream of my youth I decided to give it a shot…if for no other reason than it is a whole lot simpler to make!

Macerated strawberries, cream, lemon juice, and (the surprise ingredient) sour cream pureed, chilled and then poured into our Cuisinart ice cream freezer. In the words of Ina—“how bad can that be?!”

Not bad at all. It’s going to be a tasty summer!

Strawberries immediately after they've been tossed with sugar and Cointreau

An hour later...look a all that yummy juicy goodness!

Strawberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream
Adapted (hardly at all) from David Lebovitz

Ingredients:
1 pound fresh strawberries, rinsed and sliced
¾ cup of sugar
1 TBL Cointreau (originally recipe called for vodka or kirsch but we had neither so I went with what we had)
1 cup sour cream
1 cup heavy cream
½ lemon, juiced

1.Toss sliced strawberries with sugar and Cointreau, stirring until sugar begins to dissolve. Cover and let stand at room temperature for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
2.Place strawberries (and all the ruby red liquid that comes out of them), cream, sour cream, and lemon juice into  a blender or food processor and pulse until smooth but still slightly chunky.  Refrigerate for 1 hour. Note: if you use a blender you can just place the vessel in the fridge which means 1 less dish to wash!
3.Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.