Roasted Strawberry Ice Cream

Roasted Strawberry Ice Cream

Why make ice cream at home? I’ve always won­dered. There are many things that one can buy that I do like to make myself so that I know about what’s in it — gra­nola, baby food, uh, din­ner — but some­things have never struck me as worth it. Ice cream used to be on that list. But now I see the light, peo­ple. And it’s all thanks to Jenni. When I first received her book I swooned over the images and the recipes sounded deli­cious but I didn’t own an ice cream make so I shelved it.

Enter my new Kitchen Aid attache­ment — the ice cream maker! This lit­tle baby came into my life about a month ago and changed every­thing. Now that I’m able to actu­ally use Jenni’s amaz­ing cook book I took a closer book. It’s exactly the kind of cook book I love — you can either just use the recipes, obvi­ously, or you can pour over all of the geeky, cooking-science details. Guess which I did? Jeni Bauer runs a suc­cess­ful small chain of ice cream shops in Ohio and is obsessed with the chem­istry behind the most per­fect, creamy ice cream. She pours all of this knowl­edge into her book and cre­ated the recipes in it with an ice cream maker a home cook might use. So the infor­ma­tion is high tech but there’s noth­ing here you can’t do at home.

 

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Pho­tos by Maya Vis­nyei

Jenni’s the­ory is that all good ice cream depends on the anni­hi­la­tion of ice crys­tals. She also uses a touch of cream cheese in many of her bases and it gives an incred­i­bly rich but not over pow­er­ing flavour. In the recipe I tried first, she rec­om­mends that you only use a bit of your roasted straw­berry puree and use the rest for other things (like pour­ing over ice cream!). I decided to fol­low her recipe exactly but then added the puree in lay­ers at the end to make a swirled fin­ished product.

I hadn’t tasted the ice cream when I brought it to Maya’s stu­dio to shoot with. We worked away — ice cream can be tricky to pho­to­graph, for obvi­ous rea­sons — and got all of our pretty shots you see here. Maya said, “It seems like a lot of work, do you think it’s worth it?” Then we finally dipped spoons into the con­tainer and tried it. Silence. “That,” pro­nounced Maya, “is the best ice cream I’ve ever had.”

Roasted Strawberry Ice Cream

Ingredients

  • 1 pint of straw­ber­ries, cleaned, hulled and chopped
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 3 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 1 1/2 cup whole milk
  • 2 Tbsp corn­starch
  • 4 Tbsp cream cheese, soft­ened
  • 1/8th tsp sea salt
  • 1 1/4 cup heavy cream
  • 2/3 cup sugar
  • 2 Tbsp corn syrup
  • 1/4 cup buttermilk

Method

Pre­heat the oven to 375 Degrees.

Place the straw­ber­ries and 1/3 cup of sugar in a small baking pan

You don't want to use a large one as the straw­ber­ries need to be close together so they don't dry out. Toss every­thing around so the berries get cov­ered in sugar.

Now place in the oven for just under 10 min­utes, until they soften.

Remove from the oven and place in a blender or food proces­sor.

Give it a quick whizz until you have a puree and then add the lemon juice.

Set aside.

In a small bowl, mix 2 Tbsps of milk with the corn­starch until they are well com­bined and set aside.

In a medium bowl, whip together the cream cheese with the salt. Set this aside, too.

Get a medium, heavy-bottomed sauce pan out and add the remain­ing milk, cream, sugar and corn syrup.

Bring it to a boil over medium heat for 4 min­utes, stir­ring.

Take the pot off the heat and then slowly pour in the corn­starch and milk mix­ture, whisk­ing it in.

Put the pot back on the burner and return to medium-high heat for another minute while stir­ring, until it thick­ens.

Now remove the pot from the heat for good.

Slowly pour the hot milk mix­ture into the cream cheese, whisk­ing to keep every­thing nice and smooth.

Now add 1/2 cup of your straw­berry puree and the but­ter­milk and whisk until every­thing is com­bined. I just put cling film over this bowl and placed it in the fridge overnight to chill com­pletely.

If you don't want to wait, Jenni rec­om­mends pour­ing the cus­tard into a extra large zip lock and then plac­ing that in a bowl of ice water — that will chill it much more quickly, about 30 minutes.

Pour your com­pletely chilled ice cream mix­ture into your ice cream maker and pro­ceed accord­ing to your machine's instruc­tions.

I place mine into the very chilled bowl of my Kitchen Aid ice cream attach­ment and set the pad­dle to a low and steady stir.

In about 20 min­utes the ice cream was form­ing  into a ball and was ready to come out.

Then the ice cream is ready to be packed into the con­tainer you're going to freeze it in. I used a loaf pan and accord­ing to Jenni's instruc­tions, I lay­ered extra puree, start­ing at the bot­tom, with the ice cream.

I laid down a layer of cling film and then put the whole thing in the freezer to ripen.

If you weren't adding the lay­ers of puree you would just place your ice cream from your machine into your con­tainer and get it into the freezer to set.

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