Whenever Jose and I are in Corpus Christi, we always make a stop at Half Price Books. Although there’s a location here in Clear Lake, but the store in Corpus is a lot bigger and has a much broader selection. Last week when we were there, I was headed to the craft section, but got distracted by a stack of copies of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams! Jeni’s ice cream is an Ohio thing, so I’ve only had it once — when Melissa made a batch of her macaron ice cream sandwiches and brought them to recipe club.
Spoiler alert: they were awesome. So I promptly added this cookbook to my my Amazon wishlist…but never got around to actually purchasing it. But there it was at Half Price Books — and it was only $10!
The 4th of July seemed like the perfect day to make my first batch of Jeni’s ice cream, so I sent Jose off to the grocery store on Tuesday with a list of what I needed to make Roasted Strawberry and Buttermilk. (Coincidentally, they posted about this exact flavor on their blog on the 3rd. I read their minds!) Whole milk, heavy cream, buttermilk, cream cheese — there is a lot of dairy in ice cream, as if you didn’t realize that already. You know what I didn’t put on the list?
Strawberries.
It’s hard to make strawberry ice cream without strawberries. So I ended up back at HEB on the morning of the 4th battling the crowd for a pound of ’em. Fun times. Anyway…
Making this ice cream took a lot of dishes and a lot of time — but the good news is that the actual hands-on time is pretty short. I made the roasted strawberry puree in about 20 minutes in the morning, and then made the ice cream base in another 20 minutes while Emma took a (very short) afternoon nap. Making the base does involve cooking, so the final mixture has to cool for a bit before you finally put it in the ice cream machine. It took about 25 minutes to churn, and then the book recommends freezing for at least 4 hours before eating.
So ~40 minutes of hands-on time, but a total time of around 6 hours.
Final verdict?
This stuff was really good! The flavor was great but to be honest, what really made the difference was the texture. I’ve made ice cream before, but the texture is usually a little off — it’s always a bit icy, and it melts too fast. But this stuff? It’s creamy and not icy at all, and it sticks together instead of quickly becoming a soupy mess. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to store-bought texture in a homemade ice cream.
As soon as he finished his bowl, Jose — who barely gave the book a second glance when I bought it — picked it up and started listing all the flavors he wants me to try next. Anybody wanna come over for an ice cream party?
I’m available to sample any ice cream flavors you want to make! 🙂 Very glad that you enjoyed the ice cream!