Strawberry Ice Cream

Strawberry is one of the most colorful and common ice cream recipes in the world. As a summer time fruit, strawberries make good ice cream, a frozen confection that is popular in the summertime as well. Such likely marriage makes a creamy ice cream that vibrates with the color of rosé or tinted with the finest of pinks.

When made with fresh strawberries soaked and simmered with sugar, chunks of the fruit are present in the ice cream, along with chips of its seeds. Some strawberry ice cream versions use strawberry syrup, which gives the ice cream a bright pink ripple (brightened no less with pink food color) that runs through the smooth ice cream. The sweetness tames the innate zest of fresh strawberries and the ice cream profits fully from this delicateness in flavor.

Strawberry has long been part of history. According to the Food Timeline, “Most period iced creams were flavored with fruit,” most of which were utilized when in season. Strawberry ice cream is an important component of the Neapolitan ice cream, as one of the three ice creams in the confection. It is also one of the three ice creams scoops that make up the all American banana split, a favorite in soda fountains and ice cream houses.

To make strawberry ice cream, fresh strawberries are crushed in the blender with sugar before it’s added to a separately prepared custard base. The former is the strawberry purée. Another way of readying the strawberry portion is to hull and roughly chop (or mash) it up, sprinkled with sugar in a bowl and allowed to steep until both infuse each other with flavor. And then you create this special strawberry ice cream easy desserts.

Ingredients

500 grams strawberries
175 grams caster sugar (plus 2 tablespoons)
500 ml full fat milk
500 ml double cream
1 vanilla pod
10 large egg yolks
2 tablespoons lemon juice

Method:

Hull and roughly chop the strawberries, put them into a bowl and sprinkle over the 2 tablespoons ofcaster sugar and leave them to steep and infuse with flavour.

Pour the milk and cream into a heavy-based saucepan, and add the vanilla pod, split down the middle lengthways. Bring the pan nearly to the boil and then take it off the heat and leave to infuse for 20 minutes.

In a large bowl whisk the egg yolks and the 175g / ¾ cup sugar until thick and pale yellow. Take thevanilla pod out of the milk and cream and pour, whisking the while, the warm liquid over the yolks. Put the cleaned-out pan back on the heat with the cream, milk, egg and sugar mixture and stir the custard until it thickens, then take it off the heat and pour it into a bowl to cool.

Puree the strawberries in a processor, and when the custard is cool fold in the lemon juice and strawberry puree.

At this point you can either freeze the ice cream in an ice-cream maker, or in a plastic tub in the freezer. If you do the latter you should whip it out every hour for 3 hours as it freezes and give it a good beating, either with an electric whisk, by hand or in the processer. That gets rid of any ice crystals that form and that make the ice cream crunchy rather than smooth.