Strawberry Ice Cream
Carrie H
It's officially ice cream season!
We are blessed with a range of great local, homemade options, but sometimes you want something that's legitimately home made—as in, you made it in your own home.
This base is quick and easy and I've adapted it from a Ben and Jerry's sweet cream base, but with an important caveat. Use the best ingredients you can find and keep all necessary components as cold as humanly possible. In this case, we are talking about organic heavy cream, pastured eggs, milk from grass-fed cows and organic sugar. The berries? Well, we picked them ourselves and you know how that goes. When you pick something highly perishable like berries, you need as many options to deal with them, culinarily speaking, as possible. And ice cream is a winner, right? I used about two cups, washed, hulled and halved them, and then put them in the fridge for a couple hours while I dealt with the ice cream base, and then laid them on wax paper on a rimmed backing sheet to let them firm up a little bit in the freezer.
Ingredients
- 2 eggs, preferably organic and/or pastured
- 3/4 cup organic sugar
- 2 cups heavy whipping cream, organic
- 1 cup whole milk—you see where this is going, right?
- 2 tsp. vanilla extract
- 2 cups strawberries, hulled and halved and flash-frozen
Instructions
In a cold, medium-sized bowl, whisk the eggs for 1-2 minutes until they are foamy and fluffy. Gradually whisk in the sugar and continue whisking for another minute or two until the sugar has combined. Finally, whisk in the cream, milk and vanilla extract.
Cover the bowl and store in the fridge for at least 3-4 hours and up to overnight.
When it's time, transfer the mix to the frozen bowl of an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer's recommendations. Add the fruit when the mix has started to come together, about ten minutes before it's finished. (This may take some trial and error.) Transfer the ice cream, once it's fluffy and firming up, to a chilled, lidded container and freeze for at least 2 hours and up to overnight before consuming. This gives the ice cream a chance to set; when it comes out of the maker bowl, it's pretty soft set.
Softly set strawberry ice cream. Isn't it pretty?
