Friday Food #26: Raspberry Ripple Ice Cream

I've had an ice cream maker for several years now, but I rarely make ice cream. Last summer I'm pretty sure I never even made it once. But lately it's so hot (I know, I know, it's boring to whine about the heat) that I can't bear to do anything in the kitchen. And yet, I must. For example, Nick had a birthday. Oddly, this required pie rather than cake. (Well, he's asked for a cake for his party, which is Friday. He wants Nigella's malteser cake, which I've agreed to make despite Becca's lukewarm recommendation, and despite the fact that I have yet to find Horlick's malted milk powder in Richmond.) So, OK, I made a pie. With peaches and raspberries, both from the freezer. (Dad's raspberries from last fall, peaches we picked last summer.) Then there was half a bag of raspberries left after the pie was made. And, well, I had to do something with them.

And I had gotten the ice cream maker out a few days earlier to make Nigella's baci ice cream from Forever Summer. As soon as I made it I remembered that I'd made it once before and it was, amazingly, too rich. It was like frozen mousse, not ice cream. A fine thing, I guess, but not what I expected. And this is the experience I keep having with the ice cream maker: I make something that's fine, good even, but not exactly what I expected. (Umm, not only did I make it before, I blogged it--and I liked it better the first time!)

So anyway, where was I? Back to the ice cream recipe. Sorry.

Nigella also has a recipe for raspberry ripple ice cream in Forever Summer, but I decided to simplify my life a little bit and use the custard technique I found in the latest Gourmet (which I bought after Becca recommended it) instead of following Nigella precisely. Which actually struck me as a very Nigella thing to do, you know?

So. On with it.

Here's what you need:

4 large egg yolks
1 cup whole milk
1 cup cream
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. vanilla

2 cups frozen raspberries
1/4 cup sugar

Here's what you do:

Whisk the egg yolks and 1/3 cup sugar together until the mixture is light yellow and comes off the whisk in ribbons. Heat the milk to boiling. Pour the hot milk slowly into the egg yolk mixture, then return the mixture to the pan (Nigella wants you to clean it first, so I do, but no one else seems to care) and heat it slowly until a thick custard forms. Stir constantly as it heats. As soon as it seems custardy (like hot pudding), take it off the heat and whisk in the cream. Add the vanilla and cool the mixture to room temperature, then chill it in the fridge.

While it's chilling, puree the frozen berries with the sugar in the blender. Push the pureed mix through a sieve into a container that can go in the freezer. (Nigella adds some syrupy balsamic vinegar, but I didn't have any and didn't know how that would go over with the kids.) Put the raspberry mixture in the fridge for now, but remember to stick it in the freezer while the ice cream's working in the machine. You want it to get thick but not frozen solid, in other words.

OK. When the custard is cold, pour it into your ice cream maker and let it do its thing. Mine takes a good forty minutes to get something even remotely resembling soft-serve ice cream; yours may go faster. In any event, when it starts to look like ice cream, get the raspberry puree out of the freezer. Layer it with the vanilla ice cream in an airtight container--three layers of each, starting with ice cream. Use a wooden skewer to swirl the puree through the ice cream to make it look pretty, then set it in the freezer to harden up. Mine takes three or four hours, but it's actually better the next day. (After that, eat it fast before the ice crystals form.)

I would try more ice creams, but I already have eight egg whites in the fridge and no one here is a big meringue fan. (Not to mention that in this weather they'd be tricky...) So I'm looking for whole egg recipes only now. But this is really tasty.