Cherry Ice Cream

I know: cherry season is fifteen seconds long, and for many people, that fifteen seconds has passed.  Where I call for cherries, substitute your favorite fresh fruit: peaches, apricots, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, or plums. Or use frozen fruits.

Further, none of these recipes require an ice cream maker.

A rather trippy interpretation of an ice cream maker. Specifically, the cover.

Into the kitchen.

Pitting cherries is an incredibly messy job. Lacking a cherry pitter, the flat side of a chef’s knife will do, but cherry pitters are cheap and save cleaning up.

The pitted cherries were roughly torn by hand, then tossed into a bowl. This also gave me the chance to check for any stray pits.

I feel cherry and almond are meant to be together. To this end, I added a tablespoon of Amaretto liqueur to the ice cream. You may feel differently, or be allergic to nuts. Vanilla extract would be lovely, as would  peppermint extract or cherry liqueur. I measured the Amaretto into the cherry bowl to save washing up. The Amaretto photographs were lousy. Below, the glass lid from the bowl of chilled custard that went into the ice cream machine.

Eggs separate more easily if 1. they are fresh, and 2, they are cold. Fortunately we were eating omelets for dinner, so the broken yolk was no trouble.

Cold dulls flavors. This is a rare instance where I felt a recipe needed more sugar. Seven tablespoons was just right, but be sure to taste your cherries before deciding how much sugar to use.

As I am attempting to put weight on my (still underweight) husband, I made the custard with Straus Organic heavy cream and half-and-half, which is half milk, half cream. You might prefer a lighter ice cream, in which case use heavy cream and milk.

The first time I made cherry ice cream, I was in a hurry. I poured the custard into a metal bowl, shoved it into the fridge to cool, then crammed the bowl into an overstuffed freezer. The resulting ice cream was literally crunchy with ice crystals. It wasn’t inedible–it’s hard to mess up homemade ice cream–but neither was it great.

Learn from my mistakes.

If you are open freezing the ice cream, pour the custard into ramekins or small bowls. By “small”  think eight ounces or so (227 grams).

Give the custard adequate chilling time before moving it to the freezer. Many ice cream recipes say four hours is enough. This may be true if your fridge is a Viking. For those of us with refrigerators that are not Vikings, chill the custard 12-24 hours before freezing it. The ice cream will be better for it.

A final note concerning adding the cherries (or other fruits) to the custard. You can do this at numerous points during the ice cream making process: just before the custard goes into the refrigerator to chill, just before freezing the ice cream in your machine or freezer, or just before eating it. The choice is yours. No one time is better than another. I added the cherries just before the custard went into the refrigerator. Lacking a photo of this, I give you my ice cream scoop atop plastic wrap.

Cherry ice cream needs nothing more than a bowl and spoon.