The Taste of Summer

Buttermilk Strawberry Ice Cream with strawberry compote and chocolate fudge

Published in The Packet

I blame the ever-lovely Barn Loft for my recent culinary obsession. My family loves the amazing homemade ice cream they serve for part of the year, and we despair when the ice cream season is over.  The store bought kind cannot compete to the Barn Loft’s creamy fresh goodness. With this in mind my husband bought me an ice cream maker as an anniversary gift hoping we could recreate some of that magic for ourselves when their season ends. This may be both the best and worst purchase he has ever made for us.

I find myself making ice cream once a week. Once you get the hang of the ice cream maker and you find an ice cream base recipe that isn’t too icy or cloying, whipping up a quart is an addictive and satisfying endeavor with endless possibilities.

For a Mexican themed barbecue, we made dark chocolate cayenne ice cream. For the first few seconds, the ice cream tastes familiar and sweet, and then as you swallow it the flavour is tingly and spicy. We made the creamiest buttermilk strawberry ice cream, when Sobey’s had strawberries on sale a few weeks ago. Yesterday, I found corn on the cob I’d meant to grill and somehow lost in the back of the refrigerator. It quickly became sweet corn and blackberry ice cream. Looking at the abundance of basil leaves growing on my windowsill, I’m thinking those leaves will get chopped up and thrown in the ice cream maker this weekend.

My favorite resource for ice cream making is a book called Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer. Not only are her recipes both foolproof and interesting, she does an excellent job explaining the science behind how ice cream works. Thanks to her I am constantly thinking about how each ingredient effects an ice cream’s taste, texture, consistency and finish, which Bauer defines as, “the flavor the butterfat releases as it melts on your tongue and blooms into your nose.” I also appreciate her encouragement to experiment with new and unexpected flavours like coriander, Gorgonzola cheese, beets and sweet potatoes.  

The problem with all of our ice cream making is, of course, all of our ice cream eating. According to a 2011 article by Chloe Gibbs at The Examiner, if you eat a bowl of ice cream every night for the entire summer you’d gain eight pounds of weight in fat alone. To burn off a single 300-calorie scoop of ice cream would require a brisk hour and fifteen minute walk at four miles per hour. Ironically, that is the same amount of time it takes to mix a batch of ice cream together.

If you have time to exercise all your ice cream calories off, or you have one of those marvelous speedy metabolisms that keep weight loss, diabetes, and heart disease at bay, an ice cream maker is a fun purchase to consider. Or you can keep going to the Barn Loft until the season is through. A walk there and back should kill a few of those pesky ice cream calories, and when their ice cream season ends you’ll have all winter to fantasize about the creamy scoops that give summer it’s magical flavour.