Cherry Ice Cream!

2 c Cream
1 c Whole Milk
6 ea Egg Yolks
3/4 c White Granulated Sugar
1/2 tsp Vanilla Paste
8 drops Almond Extract
38 g Freeze Dried Tart Red Cherries (Trader Joe’s), ground to a powder

• combine all ingredients in a sous vide bag and cook at 170° F for 1 hour
• chill in ice bath
• pass liquid through fine mesh strainer
• freeze using preferred method

Whenever I work with fruit, I prefer to not add any heat. So no boiling fruits in a simple syrup or making a jam. This preserves the bright characteristics of the fruit. I also love to make fruit ice creams instead of sorbets because why not?

One major challenge when it comes to using fruits in an ice cream: excess water. When you use a jam, you can cook out a lot of that water and concentrate the flavors. When I work with fruits, I like to make a syrup by macerating the fruit with sugar and let the natural juices melt the sugar. But this introduces quite a lot of water into the ice cream, leading to a lot of ice crystals. So I was doing some research and came across this subreddit. Someone on here suggested using freeze dried fruits. If you are not familiar, freeze drying fruits is achieved by sublimate the water from the fruit by using typically liquid nitrogen. This leads to a crispy fruit that retains its bright flavors. This is different than traditional dehydrating of fruits done at higher temperatures which affects both the flavor and the texture.

So yesterday, I was at Trader Joe’s and came across a bag of freeze dried tart red cherries. I immediately grabbed them and was determined to make some cherry ice cream. When I returned home, I saw that the Reddit post recommended using around 50 g of freeze dried fruit powder per 2.5 cup recipe. I took a standard ice cream custard base recipe from serious eats and combined it with freeze dried cherry powder. As the bag was only 38 g, the flavor did fall short slightly. Will definitely bump it up and tweak the base recipe to yield less volume. Next step is to mix in some cherries and chocolate shards to make the best Cherry Garcia of my dreams!