We mentioned last Friday that our neighbors gave us a bunch of blueberries before going away on a trip. We knew that we’d be able to put them to good use, somehow, perhaps even to share with the volunteers at our weekly walk. After all, shouldn’t sharing be contagious? We think so, so we searched our archives and found this easy, probably the easiest, ice cream recipe.
This recipe came from Mashed, by Holly Herrick, where it was originally titled “Blues Bursting Blueberry Ice Cream.” While we like that name, we prefer to use our more accurate title for this recipe, especially since you can tell at a glance that it won’t require eggs, or the cooking of a custard, as do French-style ice creams. Don’t worry; both styles of ice cream are good, very good. They’re just different from one another.
Philadelphia-Style Blueberry Ice Cream
Ingredients
- 370 g fresh blueberries (2 1/2 cups)
- 200 g sugar (1 cup)
- Juice from one small lemon
- 720 g heavy cream (3 cups)
Instructions
- Place blueberries, sugar, and lemon juice in a blender and process until smooth. Transfer to a large bowl.
- Stir in heavy cream, cover, and refrigerate overnight to chill completely.
- Set up your ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer's directions.
- Pack in an airtight container and freeze.
Ingredient discussion:
We think that you’d have no problem using frozen blueberries for this, but, since it’s the start of fresh blueberry season, go for fresh. Use real lemon juice, from a freshly squeezed lemon. Sure, it’s there to hold the color, and won’t add anything in terms of flavor, but bottled lemon juice is not good, and what would you do with the remainder? For the heavy cream, we prefer, but do not always use, organic heavy cream. Organic heavy cream has only cream, no additives. But, like you, we have to balance the cost differential between organic and non-organic, and, depending on price and availability, we sometimes get non-organic.
Procedure in detail:
Blend. Place the berries, sugar, and lemon juice in a blender and blend away. Keep blending, and blending, until smooth. We expected that the blueberries would blend completely, leaving a uniform mix, but even after a minute of high-speed, we still had small bits of blueberry skin remaining. So, when we transferred our blueberry mix to a bowl, we made sure to strain the mixture. We think it’s always worth the effort to strain after blending, especially if you want smooth ice cream.
Stir in cream. Now add the cream — we didn’t use a big enough container, so we could only add two cups of cream, but we added the last cup while churning the next day — and stir it in. You’ll have a nice, thick, purple ice cream base that tastes delicious now. Too bad you need to wait a bit for the ice cream.
Chill. Cover the ice cream mix and place in the refrigerator to chill completely, preferably overnight. This chilling allows the flavors to meld a bit, but, more importantly, chilling will make the mixture churn faster and more completely the next day.
Churn. Set up your ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer’s directions. We use the ice cream maker attachment for our KitchenAid mixer and love it.
Pack. After churning pack and place in the freezer to harden. Or try some ice cream now. Your choice. Since we’re bringing our ice cream to share with a bunch of people, we packed it into small single-serving cups.
After packing up a bunch of small cups, there was a bit of ice cream left in the churn. It was too little to pack into another container, but it seemed just enough for each of us to have a small bowl. It was delicious, very blueberry- flavored, and extremely creamy. Five stars.
