Week Thirty: Oceania

We finish of our ice cream tour of the world in Oceania. I originally had an entirely different ice cream planned for this week, but the key ingredient got lost in the post and actually I’m not disappointed because I was trying to work out how to incorporate it into an ice cream, and in the end I got to do another fruit ice cream. I’ve been enjoying the fruits lately, helped by my local supermarket have a buy one get one free on a wide range of fruits so I’ve been making some ice creams I’d never thought about relatively cheaply, at least in homemade ice cream terms. Passionfruit was excellent, gooseberry less so. The nice thing about being an amateur ice cream maker is, I never knew it was meant to be difficult to add fruit to ice cream. I follow how the Gunters confectioners do it, namely using the juice/thin pulp of the fruit and adjusting the dairy to bring the water back down, and it works. As a nice bonus, the fruit recipes are no cook ones, which is much appreciated in the slightly hotter summer that we’re now getting in the UK. 

And I’ll segue slightly awkwardly into: you might see a few changes around here. Nothing drastic, I’ll still be posting more or less weekly with my ice cream for that week’s theme, and we still have twenty two more weeks of ice cream to do this year. I’ve enjoyed this so much, I already knew how to make ice cream but having the themes has pushed me into flavours and techniques I probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise, and I can’t wait to see what’s still to come. But I’ve also started thinking about what I want the next chapter of my ice cream journey to look like; I’m still all about the historic recipes and, as demonstrated by the successful every time fruit recipes, I think modern ice cream makers have a lot they could use from the past techniques. I’ve been thinking about how I want to go about bringing this way of making ice cream to more people, and I’m growing excited about putting these ideas into practice. There might be a small break between this chapter and the next, or they could overlap - I haven’t decided yet!

So on that note, this recipe is a little different. It’s still very much a Gunters style recipe, but with no awkward measurements. This is a streamlined fruit base and it’s all built around ratios (which was inspired by the Gunters water ice recipes, which again I wouldn’t have tried if not for these weekly themes) so it speaks to the maths and stats person in me. Basically, weigh the fruit juice and everything else is the same weight as that, apart from the whipping cream which is twice the weight.

Kiwi ice cream

Ingredients

Kiwi fruits - I used four because that was the pack size from my local supermarket, but I’d suggest maybe five (20%)

Single (19% butterfat) cream (20%)

Double (39% butterfat) cream (40%)

Caster sugar (20%)

You’ll notice no weights, because it’s all based on the weight of the kiwi fruit juice you get

Method

1. Juice the kiwi fruits - I used a blender to create a kiwi mush and then pushed it through a sieve - and weigh the juice

2. Weigh the creams, the same amount of single cream as kiwi juice and double the amount of double cream as kiwi juice. Also weigh the sugar, same amount as the kiwi juice

3. Slowly whisk the kiwi juice and creams (I use a stand mixer and balloon whisk) whilst adding the sugar gradually; continue whisking until the sugar is fully mixed in

4. Chill mixture for several hours, preferably overnight

5. Just prior to churning, strain mixture through a sieve

6. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping at soft serve texture

7. Put ice cream into a container and freeze for at least four hours and preferably overnight.

This is a really nice ice cream. With the exception of gooseberry ice cream, which is a nice tart flavour but it gets lost in an ice cream, all of the fruit ice creams have been good ice creams - creamy and refreshing. And these ratios work for the majority of fruits, so if you’re not a kiwi fruit fan you can substitute with a different fruit.