Fresh from the Freezer

Few things in life are more wholesome and refreshing than strawberry ice cream made from real strawberries. I’m not talking about anything that’s icy or made with artificial flavoring—nothing compares to the real stuff. For the home cook, homemade strawberry ice cream presents a dilemma present in many fruit ice creams: How do you make a fruit-flavored ice cream without it turning icy? Ice cream needs some water, and milk supplies more than enough. Adding fruit to an ice cream base increases the amount of water, and without adjusting for the added water content, you’re looking at a disappointing ice cream that’s too hard to be scooped. The solution seems easy. You might think that, for strawberry ice cream, the best solutions are to either cook the water out of your strawberries or just opt for freeze-dried. These two options, however, have their limitations. Cooked strawberry, while delicious, does not taste as refreshing and bold as fresh strawberry. Additionally, while free...

I almost didn’t post this recipe because it isn’t seasonally appropriate. Cranberry is more of a fall or winter flavor. But in truth, I need to post something this month if I want to keep up my new year’s resolution of posting here once a month. It’s 10:07 PM on May 31 st as I write this post. This recipe’s all I’ve got. This sorbet is dense and creamy, the natural result of pectin-rich cranberries blended with just a few other ingredients. I made a very large batch of it for Hanukkah, and half a year later, there’s still a little bit in the freezer. Don’t get me wrong; it’s delicious. It’s just so heavy , and I can’t eat it all the time. Recently, I found a description online for how to turn fruit puree into juice. I think doing that would help produce a lighter, more refreshing sorbet. For now, please enjoy this dense and creamy sorbet. It’s zippy, sweet, and tart, with just the right amount of orange juice to mellow out any bitterness from the cranberries. This is definite...

 Cookie dough ice cream is an absolutely quintessential, classic flavor, second perhaps only to chocolate or vanilla. Also, everyone knows cookie dough is a whole flavor unto itself. Cookie dough does not have the same flavor as baked cookies. Chocolate chip cookies taste completely different from the unbaked sum of their parts. When chocolate chip cookies go into the oven for baking, the butter, chocolate, and sugar all melt into one cohesive final product. Baked cookies, while buttery and crispy, don’t have the same satisfying chew as raw cookie dough, nor do they retain the individual textures of all of their original ingredients. When cookie dough is still in its raw (and perhaps superior) form, it tastes like butter, caramel, and fudge all at once. The crunch of unbaked sugar granules provides textural contrast to smooth, decadent butter, which is something that a cookie cannot do. Unfortunately, if you eat the raw dough from a regular cookie recipe, you risk contracting E. ...

  Spring has sprung, the air has gotten warmer, and my sinuses have filled with pollen. But really, besides for hay fever, there are countless reasons to love spring. Strawberries… baby birds poking their little, itty bitty beaks out of eggs… strawberries… the crisp breeze, not yet too hot, the temperature juuust right… strawberries. I really, really like strawberries. They’re one of my favorite fruits. They’re delicious in salads, in all sorts of desserts, in drinks, dipped in chocolate, eaten plain, or—my favorite—in a sandwich with peanut butter. As a part of my Garbage Food series, today I’ll be introducing a simple recipe that uses strawberry tops to infuse water. Drinking water has never been a problem for me. I’m not one of those people who carries around a gallon of water wherever I go, but I’ve also never hated drinking water. Some people view hydration as a chore, even going so far as to say that water “tastes boring.” I don’t really feel the need for my water t...

By all accounts, this recipe should not work. Before I make ice cream (or most other frozen treats, for that matter), I first run the recipe through icecreamcalc to get an idea of how it will turn out. In my opinion, one of the worst things is an ice cream recipe that ends up being too hard to scoop. I like using icecreamcalc to make sure that the ice cream will be nice and scoopable even when it’s... well... fresh from the freezer. When I plug David Lebovitz’s Chocolate Sorbet/Sherbet recipe into icecreamcalc under the “sorbet” setting, everything looks all wrong. The water is too low, the solids are too high, and it’s all too sweet. Theoretically, this chocolate sorbet should turn out grainy, overly sweet, and fatty. Instead, this chocolate sorbet comes out richer and more decadent than any chocolate ice cream you’ve ever had while somehow also managing to be light and refreshing. It’s impossibly creamy and tastes like you churned a brownie. It’s also accidentally vegan as ...