Honey Peach Ice Cream

Tommi of Brown Interior selected Honey-Peach Ice Cream for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. Check out her blog for the complete recipe. I didn’t know what to expect this week with a recipe for ice cream. I consider myself a baker and ice cream falls outside of that realm. I like eating ice cream, but making it? I don’t know.

I was actually hoping that we would get a “rewind” this week. When the weekly recipe requires special equipment (like an ice cream maker), we can have the option of making a previously-selected recipe instead. There were a couple of recipes that were selected before I joined Tuesdays with Dorie that I really want to try! I was hoping for a chance to try one of those recipes, but since there are instructions on the Internet on how to make ice cream without an ice cream maker, no rewind this time. I haven’t missed a week since I joined Tuesdays with Dorie, and I didn’t want that to change.

I used the instructions on how to make ice cream from Dave Lebovitz’s website. It didn’t look too hard, but looked like it would take a long time. It did take a long time. I chilled the ice cream mixture in the refrigerator for about 3 hours and then it took about 4 hours for it to become ice cream. 4 hours, stirring every 30 minutes was a bit tedious. And my kitchen was a complete mess when I was done making the ice cream!

The ice cream mixture came together easily. The recipe said to dice the peaches and then bring them to a boil with the honey, and cook them until soft. I was actually worried about getting ripe peaches, which seems to generally be impossible in Western Washington. My husband picked up some very ripe peaches at the store, so I didn’t even cook them. They were so soft already that the cooking process seemed completely unnecessary. I also only used 3 peaches, which I pureed. I didn’t want chunks of peaches in my ice cream.

I was pleasantly surprised by the ice cream. The texture is pretty good, not icy at all. The flavor…well, I’m not sure. I do like ripe peaches, but I don’t like peach yogurt so I can’t say that peaches are a favorite. I used cinnamon-infused honey in the ice cream, and I’m not sure that was the best choice. It tasted fabulous on its own, but in the ice cream it was really overpowering. I tasted the ice cream the day after I made it and the cinnamon honey gave the ice cream a weird, kind of bitter aftertaste. When I was getting ready to photograph the ice cream 2 days after I made it, the cinnamon flavor had mellowed a lot and it tasted pretty good. Not bad for my first try at ice cream. I can’t say that it’s something that I plan on making again, but it was a good experience.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, on page 437.