beat the heat with Cucumber Caraway Ice Cream!

Came up with this recipe over the weekend. Really liked the result. Crisp and refreshing on a hot day. Complex flavor that seems to change during the bite. Feedback welcome!

The ingredients were inspired by things I might put in a cucumber salad. Caraway came to mind and turns out to be used in Swedish cucumber salads. It gives a deep, woody note to the ice cream. Then some sour cream tang and finally a little lemon to brighten it up.  

There's a definite cucumber flavor. The trick is to remove some of the water from the cucumbers first. They are 96% water!

This recipe is designed for a crisp, refreshing ice cream rather than a super-smooth and creamy one.  If you want it smoother, you could use more stabilizer, increase from 4 to 6 eggs, and/or replace the milk with cream (since the cucumber water already lowers the fat %).

• 2 t caraway seed
• 6 dill stalks (5g package)
• 1¼ cups cream
• ¼ cup milk
• 4 egg yolks
• ¾ cup sugar
• stabilizer of choice (to prevent iciness; I used ⅛ t Avacream)
• 2 large cucumbers
• kosher salt
• 1½ cups full-fat sour cream (12 oz)
• 1 scant tablespoon lemon juice
• ¼ t fine sea salt (optional)

1. Toast caraway seeds in a small dry skillet over medium heat, for 1-2 minutes until fragrant.  Then crush them with a mortar and pestle.
2. Flavor the cream: Combine cream, milk, caraway, and dill (rinsed but unchopped) in a pot and heat to a simmer.  Then turn off heat and allow to steep for 30 min., stirring occasionally.
3. Make the custard: Reheat cream mixture.  Whisk yolks and sugar well in a bowl until you have a pale yellow liquid.  Temper the yolks by gradually adding a cup of the hot cream mixture in a thin stream, whisking vigorously.  Then return the mix to the pot and cook over medium heat until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.
4. Stabilize: At this point, I sprinkled the Avacream over the surface and stirred it in (it activates in hot liquid).  You may prefer a different stabilizer such as xanthan gum or cornstarch. 
5. Strain the custard through a fine-mesh strainer.  If you like, you could rescue the dill from the strainer: discard the stems, but chop the fronds and add them back for some fun bits of flavor, texture, and color — it's one way to make your cucumber ice cream green.  (I didn't try that, but can confirm that the fronds still had a nice flavor.)
6. Chill the custard for a few hours.  In the meantime …
7. Make cucumber puree: Halve the cucumbers lengthwise, remove seeds with a spoon, then slice as thinly as possible into half-rounds.  Toss with 1T kosher salt and leave in a colander in the sink to wilt for about 3 hours.  This will remove a lot of water, shrinking the cucumbers from about 2.5 to 1.25 cups.  Rinse off as much of the remaining salt as possible; this may take a few minutes!  The cucumbers should taste only slightly salty at this point; they'll be denser but still somewhat crunchy.  Puree in a blender to get about 0.75 cups of slush.
8. Whisk into the cool custard: The sour cream, ¾ cup cucumber puree, lemon juice, and sea salt, adjusting the amounts to taste.  (This keeps the sour cream cool so it doesn't curdle.)
9. Churn in your 1.5-quart ice cream maker and freeze for several hours to set.

Note: I actually used 1½ cups cream, ½ cup milk, 1 cup sour cream.  But I increased the sour cream in the recipe above, so its flavor can come through a little more next time.