Pink ice cream,” as little Ruthie calls it, is the favourite of one of our favourite visitors. The rest of us call this lovely summery ice cream “Strawberry Ripple.” It’s made with July’s ripest berries and threaded with a rosy ribbon of strawberry swirl. You can also add beet juice to seriously pink up things.
Using fresh berries at the peak of strawberry season really makes for a bright, strawberry sauce. The sugar helps preserve it — you could freeze it and bring it out, like freezer jam, whenever you want to make a sundae during the year.
Ingredients
- Strawberries 15–20 (453 g), green tops removed and coarsely chopped
- Fresh Lemon Juice 1 Tbs (about 1/2 a lemon)
- Sugar 1 cup (200 g)
- Heavy Cream 2 cups (473 ml)
- Whole Milk 1 cup (236 ml)
- Fine Sea Salt 1/4 tsp
- Egg Yolks 5 large (90 g)
- Strawberry Sauce 1 qty (recipe below)
Make It
- Combine strawberries, lemon juice and sugar in a medium-sized saucepan. Set aside for 20 minutes, or until the strawberries have released their juices.
- Prepare an ice bath.
- Add cream, milk and salt to the strawberries. Using an immersion blender, purée until smooth. (Or you can blend ingredients in a regular blender, then transfer to the saucepan.)
- Stir over medium-high heat for about 5 minutes, until steam begins to rise from the surface. Remove from heat.
- While the dairy is warming, whisk the egg yolks in a medium-sized bowl. To temper the yolks, slowly pour 1 cup of the heated cream mixture into the yolks while whisking vigorously. Continue adding heated cream and whisking until about half of the hot cream has been added. Transfer the yolk mixture to the pan.
- Cook the mixture over medium heat, stirring continuously with a heatproof spatula, until the mixture is thick enough to coat the spatula or a digital thermometer reads 180°F (about 5–6 minutes). Immediately remove from heat and strain the custard through a fine-mesh sieve into the inner bowl of the prepared ice bath.
- Cool the custard in the ice bath until room temperature, stirring occasionally. Cover and chill in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, or overnight.
- Place storage container in the freezer to chill. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions until ice cream is thick and creamy and has increased in volume by about a third.
- Spoon a few scoops of just-churned ice cream into your storage container. Dollop strawberry sauce on top. Using a butter knife, gently swirl sauce into ice cream. Repeat by layering with ice cream and more sauce, then freeze.
Pink It Up
To punch up the pinkness of your strawberry ice cream, dye the base with beet juice. Grate a large beet (wearing gloves if you don’t care for dyed hands) over a plate lined with a few sheets of paper towel. Gather up the edges of the paper towel so that the grated beets are enclosed. Squeeze the beets directly over the strained ice cream base (step 7) until you have your desired colour. Beet juice is so vibrant that just a little juice goes a long way.
Strawberry Sauce
- Strawberries 8–12 (200 g), thickly sliced
- Sugar 3/4 cup (150 g)
- Fresh Lemon Juice 2 Tbs (30 ml) (about 1 lemon)
- Combine all the ingredients in a medium-sized saucepan and cook over medium heat for 10–12 minutes, until syrupy. Remove from heat. (If desired, purée for a smooth sauce.) Set aside to cool.
- Sauce can be stored in a sealed glass jar in the refrigerator for up to 1 week or in the freezer for up to 2 months.
Excerpted from Great Scoops: Recipes from a Neighborhood Ice Cream Shop by Marlene Haley and Amelia Ryan of The Merry Dairy with Anne DesBrisay. Photographs by Christian Lalonde. Copyright © 2022 by The Merry Dairy. Excerpted with permission from Figure 1 Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
