After extensive side-by-side testing, I’ve become a convert: Serious Eats for the win.
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Okay you two; @MunchkinRedux , @mig ; what are you guys talking about? Is it strawberry ice cream? Sorbet?
I’m talking about this one:
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Yep, that’s my go-to strawberry ice cream recipe. Several of us had tested competing recipes some summers ago, and I had forgotten where @MunchkinRedux netted out.
IIRC, the competing recipes were perhaps David Lebovitz’s strawberry sour cream ice cream, and maybe another one, roasted strawberry maybe?
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So, since we’re talking strawberry ice cream, I forgot to post this a month or so ago. I’ve started plumbing my freezer for things I put up last year and never got around to using for various reasons. One of them was the compote of macerated strawberries for Lebovitz’s strawberry sour cream ice cream from the Perfect Scoop, for which there’s a link in the OP of this thread — made and frozen last fall, when strawberries were at their flavor peak here. This was the first strawberry ice cream I’ve made. Strawberry’s never been my favorite, but I liked the idea of it with sour cream, and it came through with good fruit flavor and a lush feel with just a little tang to offset it. The only changes I made were using white rum rather than vodka or kirsch and adding a bit of salt.
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I love this DL recipe, too. It was a tough call between this and the SE recipe - I would happily eat either.
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I may have to try the SE one too, at a later date. (Strawberries are good right now, but will be even better in two or three months.)
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Three months ?!?!
What can I say, we are spoiled for strawberries in California. In the Bay Area, they’re available at the farmers’ markets more or less from sometime in March to sometime in October, weather depending, although they don’t have great flavor till the season .really gets into swing.
I’ve lived in the Northeast, so I do know from more fleeting and precious strawberry seasons. Other summer berries don’t have the same lengthy season here.
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I thought June was the best month in N California.
It’s really variable, in my experience, and often weather-dependent. I’ve had some very flavorful ones recently, but I often find them better later on. The ones I put up for the sour cream ice cream last year, I froze in late September and they were stellar. A lot of produce was on the later side starting out this year due to the run of late-winter storms.
Interesting! I noticed the jam I used for the bars was made in September, and was wondering "what was I doing with strawberries in September?’
I am in NoorCal too, and I thought of the BEST strawberries as a spring thing before it gets crazy hot inland, but that’s probably just for the ones in the immediate vicinity.
I think it’s also because the first ones seem so special, and aren’t competing with stone fruit!
It’s fun to go pick them in Davenport, on the coast, south of Half Moon Bay. They are organic.
I learned the hard way … check the weather report, go when it’s not windy!!!
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A lot of the strawberries at our East Bay markets are from farms south in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties, so definitely cooler. We have a lot of farms from closer to you in Yolo County, but not the major sources of strawberries.
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Local raspberries are in, so I picked three quarts on Saturday morning and tonight prepped half of them for RLB’s extremely excellent raspberry ice cream from her Ice Cream Bliss book.
She has a master method for thorn berry ice creams (rasp, black rasp, blackberry) with different % of sugar and other ingredients based on the berry you’re using. The recipe presumes you’re starting with frozen berries though, which I never am, so I have to improvise a little at the onset. Even so, the method is very laborious, but the results make it worth the effort.
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We won’t see delicious local peaches for another 6 weeks or so. In the meantime, whittling down my freezer stash of fruit purees from last year to make room for more.
DL’s peach frozen “yogurt”, including the modification of added cream. Yum!
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I’ll have to keep this in mind when the farmers’ market peaches get great (and preferably once freestones come in, which will probably coincide).
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This is, without a doubt, the most surprising flavour of sorbet I’ve ever made: Spiced Apple Sorbet from Carmela Ice Cream in Pasadena, featured in EAT. COOK. L.A. by Aleksandra Crapanzano. It’s like eating frozen apple pie, but in a smooth sorbet. Oddly, there are even notes of buttery pastry, though there is no butter or flour in the recipe. Extremely good, will absolutely make again.
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What are the ingredients? Any guess as to where the buttery flavor comes from? Condensed milk?
Oooooo interesting !
