Peach Ice Cream

photo: Eric Diesel

Summertime is ice cream time. Your walking partner on a constitutional through the park may be a frosty ice pop, a creamy paleta, a foil-wrapped ice cream bar. Perhaps your walk leads you to the destination of the ice cream shop. If your shop is in the northeast you may be ordering coffeemilk, and if your coffeemilk is in Rhode Island you're not ordering a milkshake but a cabinet. The local diner serves a fine banana split, while the local pasta hut offers a decadent Spumoni or a pillowy semifreddo. A carhop will bring you a float in a frosty mug, but if you're in the south, your brown cow will be an orange one if the ice cream is floating in orange soda pop instead of root beer. And in southern California, cool creams and sexy sorbets are flavored with limoncello, hazelnut, and blackberries and Cabernet.

When I recommended an ice cream maker last spring it was, as with everything I write about, based on personal experience. John and I had gotten our first ice cream maker as young men when, too broke to traipse to a summer house on Memorial Day weekend, we saw a stack of them for sale at a local shop and decided to treat ourselves during our holiday weekend. This was a workhorse model that, even though it required the old-fashioned method of rock salt and ice, rewarded us with a lovely bowlful, as bracing as a blast from the air conditioner, as soft as a well worn t-shirt. We didn't mind the labor it took to make the ice cream; in fact, that made it both all the more fun and all the more rewarding. We took proper care of that machine, cleansing it thoroughly after each use and storing it upright in its own dedicated area of the pantry. It rewarded us for over fifteen years with countless bowls of ice cream and more extra pounds than either of us cares to admit. When that ice cream maker finally quit working, we tested a couple of models before settling on the ice cream maker currently in use in our urban homes: the Cuisinart Classic Ice Cream Maker. To read the full recommendation, click here.

We have made ice cream in flavors as classic as vanilla, chocolate and strawberry and as adventurous as green tea, cinnamon and banana-caramel. It's pretty hard to find a flavor of ice cream that's unlikeable, but among our favorites is peach. Peach ice cream lands in the bowl, on the tongue, and around the waistline as one of the definitive tastes of summer. The distinct flavor of peaches agrees with the creamy suspension of ice cream. Peaches are naturally sweet, an important consideration when making any frozen dessert, for while freezing typically intensifies flavor it can sometimes flatten it out. There is no danger of that with peaches, which take to freezing so well that this original recipe uses the bags of them you can find in the freezer section of the grocery store.

As we learned when making green tea ice cream, you do not need an ice cream maker in order to make ice cream. However, a good ice cream maker is easy to operate, so if you follow the instructions, making ice cream is virtually foolproof. That said, if you wish to use the stir and freeze method as recorded in Urban Home's recipe for green tea ice cream, it would work with the recipe below. However you freeze it, this ice cream is good enough to serve on its own, and a double-treat when topped with a drizzle of homemade peach jam.

PEACH ICE CREAM
This recipe is written for an ice cream maker with a five-cup freezer bowl. If the bowl of your ice cream maker is smaller, adjust the amount of milk and cream accordingly. Most ice cream makers require the bowl to be cold when you start churning; freeze the bowl according to the instructions that accompany your ice cream maker. Make ice cream early on the day you plan to serve it and it will be ready to serve by mid-afternoon.

1 cup whole milk
1 -1/2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 16 ounce bag frozen peaches
1 vanilla bean
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

One hour before churning
1. Decant the milk into a clean glass measuring cup with a spout.
2. Lay the vanilla bean lengthways on a cutting board and use a paring knife to slice the vanilla bean lengthways into two long strips.
3.Working carefully to protect the vanilla bean seeds, hold one of the vanilla bean halves over the milk. Carefully scrape the knife down the inside of the bean so that the tiny seeds fall into the milk. They will also stick to the knife; swirl the knife in the milk to release those seeds. Place the scraped vanilla bean half as well as the unscraped half into a glass jar for future use.
4. Cover the measuring cup with plastic wrap and refrigerate for one hour.
5. Measure the sugar and cinnamon together into a small bowl. Use a wire whisk to combine.
6. Decant the heavy cream into a medium mixing bowl. Use one hand to whisk the cream while using the other hand to pour the spiced sugar mixture in a thin stream into the cream. Whisk just until the sugar dissolves; it is okay to build some volume, but you do not want to whip the cream.
7. Cover the sweetened cream with plastic wrap and refrigerate for one hour.

Make the ice cream
1. Open the frozen peaches and place them into the bowl of a food processor fitted with the chopping blade. Pulse them lightly until they break up; typically 8 - 10 pulses. It is okay if some large chunks of fruit remain.
2. Put the ice cream maker together. Remove the mixing bowl from the freezer and secure it to the base of the unit according to the manufacturer's directions. Plug the ice cream maker in.
3. Remove the infused milk and spiced cream from the refrigerator. Carefully pour the infused milk and the spiced cream into the ice cream maker's mixing bowl. Use a clean silicon spatula to get all of both mixtures into the bowl. Use the spatula to lightly mix them together.
4. Use the spatula to gently place the pulsed, frozen peaches into the mixture in the ice cream maker's mixing bowl. If there are fill guides on the bowl, do not exceed them; if you have too much fruit, you can always incorporate it at the last moment.
5. Put the lid on the ice cream maker and process the ice cream according to manufacturer's directions. The ice cream should build volume as it processes; watch to make sure it doesn't overflow. Churning ice cream typically takes between 15 - 20 minutes.
6. Once the mixture has built volume and achieved a creamy consistency, turn off the ice cream maker. Use the spatula to decant the ice cream into a clean freezer-safe container. If there is extra fruit, stir it into the ice cream.
7. Refrigerate the ice cream until firm, approximately 1 hour.
8. Serve.