Peach Ice Cream

Hey Y’all!  

I was in the grocery store last week, as one does, and I made the mistake of walking past the produce section. Silly me.  On display: a row of beautiful eastern North Carolina peaches.  At that moment, as the produce section spotlights cast an angelic haze over that row of peaches, I realized it’s stone fruit season!  The rest of the details of that shopping trip are hazy, but I do know that I walked out of that store with 4 pounds of peaches and 2 pounds of sweet cherries.  And if you’re curious, I went into the store for milk. Lol. 

Peach Ice Cream DISCLAIMER

This recipe for peach ice cream makes about 1.5 quarts; involves a generous splash of bourbon and requires an ice cream maker and a fine mesh strainer.  Once you make the first batch you will be hooked.

Peach Ice Cream is the most quintessential summer dessert.  After I graduated from college, I worked in a public affairs office at Clemson and this was where I learned that the admin team is the most important team of any office. These women handled those executives and kept the morale high.  How?  In the summer, one of  them would show up at the office with the ice cream churn and a ton of rock salt.  Another one would have picked up a peck of peaches from their neighbor’s orchard. During lunch, they would sit in the conference room and put that ice cream together. Anyone visiting that office from the hours of 12-2, [and I literally mean anyone] they would be offered a cup of peach ice cream along with a healthy dose of southern hospitality.  Unless you’re vegan or have food allergies– this was not an event to be missed. 

Anyway, when I got home with my bounty, I  immediately knew that I needed to turn these fresh peaches into homemade peach ice cream. 

Ingredients to make peach ice cream

• Fresh Peaches (obviously)
• Lemon Juice 
• Sugar
• Heavy Cream
• Whole Milk
• Egg yolks
• Vanilla extract
• Bourbon (optional)

Because we are making a custard based ice cream we need to carefully temper the eggs in the warmed up heavy cream to make sure that the egg yolks don’t turn into scrambled eggs. That’s complete buzzkill.  How do you temper eggs?  It’s really simple.  The egg yolks are whisked together with some cold heavy cream.  Then a slow stream of the warmed (but not too hot) cream is poured into the egg mixture, while the mixture is being stirred.  Think about it this way, we have to slowly raise the temperature of the eggs and we need to do that gently.  

Special Equipment: 

This recipe requires an ice cream maker.  I have the Cuisinart 2 Qt Ice Cream Maker.  It’s very simple to use, as long as you remember the first rule of ice cream making:  Put the ice cream bowl in the freezer 24 hours before you’re ready to use it.  If you have the space, keep it in the freezer all of the time. 

You will also need an airtight container for the finished ice cream.  Most of the time I use a tupperware container, but you can buy containers specifically for ice cream.  My favorite is this Tovolo container. 

A fine mesh strainer, like this one, is the most important tool in your arsenal for making ice cream.  After the eggs are tempered (see more about that below), the custard is cooked over medium heat until the custard thickens.  If the custard heats too much or isn’t stirred enough, you can end up with some chunky custard solids.  The mesh strainer helps eliminate the solids keeping the peach ice cream nice and smooth. 

How to Temper Eggs

Because we are making a custard based ice cream we need to carefully temper the eggs in the warmed up heavy cream to make sure that the egg yolks don’t turn into scrambled eggs. That’s complete buzzkill.  How do you temper eggs?  It’s really simple.  The egg yolks are whisked together with some cold heavy cream.  Then a slow stream of the warmed (but not too hot) cream is poured into the egg mixture, while the mixture is being stirred.  Think about it this way, we have to slowly raise the temperature of the eggs and we need to do that gently.  

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