We're coming to the end of strawberry season over here. But you can still get huge boxes in the shops for the equivalent of pennies.
And they still taste great. The darker the berries, the sweeter the juice.
I have some Kefir in the fridge and had heard you can use it interchangeably with buttermilk in recipes.
So I'd thought I'd try the Roasted Strawberry and Buttermilk recipe from Jenis Splendid Ice Cream at Home.
Jenis book is great and I love her ice creams but her standard base involves a lot of faffing around with corn starch and cream cheese that sometimes I can't be bothered with.
The corn starch and cream cheese are presumably a home cook friendly way of getting some stabilization and extra milk solids in the ice cream.
But you can achieve better results, more easily (which is important, as I'm quite lazy) with a proper ice cream stabilizer blend and skimmed milk powder.
So I used those instead.
The result was much less intense than the Strawberry Ice Cream with Balsamic Vinegar I made a couple of weeks ago.
This is a much subtler, lighter ice cream with the Kefir bringing out a tart perfume in the strawberries.
Lovely...
Roasted Strawberry and Kefir Ice Cream
Ingredients
Ice Cream Base
- 484 grams Milk 3.5 - 4% fat, chilled
- 384 grams Whipping / Heavy cream 32 - 40% fat, chilled
- 80 grams Kefir or Buttermilk
- 100 grams Skimmed Milk Powder
- 150 grams Granulated sugar
- 1.5 tbsp Karo Light Corn Syrup
- 6 grams Ice Cream Stabilizer
Roasted Strawberries
- 340 grams Fresh strawberries
- 70 grams Granulated sugar
- 3 tbsp Lemon juice
Instructions
Roasted Strawberries
- Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C). Wash and dry the strawberries. Cut out the green stalks and then cut them into thick slices. Mix them with the sugar and roast in a baking dish for around 8 minutes or until they're soft.
- Let the strawberries cool slightly. Then puree in a food processor with the lemon juice. Measure out 2/3 of the mixture for the recipe. Keep the other 1/3 for something else!
Ice Cream
- Mix all the dry ice cream ingredients (Skimmed Milk Powder, Granulated sugar, Ice Cream Stabilizer) together, thoroughly, in a bowl.
- Then add all the wet ingredients (Milk, Cream, Corn Syrup) except the Kefir to the bowl and blend thoroughly with a stick blender. Alternatively, you can do this in a liquidizer.
- Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and stirring continuously over a medium-low heat, bring it to the the temperature at which the stabilizer will hydrate. This varies from one stabilizer brand to another and will be written on the packet. It should never boil.
- When the mixture reaches the correct temperature it will start to thicken. Take it off the heat. Cool in an ice bath.
- Then add the strawberry puree and Kefir and blend again. Transfer the mixture to a bowl with a lid and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
- Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker and churn until it has the consistency of whipped cream. Then transfer it to a plastic freezer box and freeze for around 1 hour.
- After an hour it should be soft enough to serve directly from the freezer but firm enough to melt slowly. If you've left it in the freezer for longer and it's too hard to serve, simply leave it out until it's softened.
So I saw in your recipe you used stabilizer, but you didn’t use any emulsifier, is there any specific reason?
No specific reason. If I’m going to eat the ice cream very quickly, sometimes I can’t be bothered!