Strawberry Ice Cream
strawberry ice cream video recipe – scroll down for printable recipe
We had one of those salt-cooled, hand-cranked ice cream makers when I was a kid. My brother and I would take turns sitting outside on the porch, adding ice and salt and of course, cranking it with our puny kid muscles. Most often, we’d make peach or strawberry ice cream (or sometimes grape ice cream!).
When it was peach, the peaches were from the peach trees in our yard. When I say “yard” I mean, the large expanse of dirt and rocks and dirty rocks punctuated by scrubby juniper trees and sporadic white peach trees. My great-grandmother planted a few peach trees long before I was born and they had spread, if not like wildfire, at least like fruiting trees do when animals and humans eat their fruit and throw the pits all around. The family lore was that one of the original peach trees was struck by lightning and ever since had born white peaches. Who knows if that legend is truth, but to this day those white peaches in my memory are the best peaches I’ve ever had.
When it was strawberry ice cream, the strawberries might have come from Poteet, Texas, a town known for their strawberries. They have a strawberry festival every year: The Poteet Strawberry Festival, sure enough. We went as a family one year; I was in sixth grade. It was fun. There were all kinds of strawberry things to eat — strawberry ice cream, strawberry jam, strawberry shortcake — as well as strawberry-themed accessories and t-shirts. When we got home, I called my best friend and told her I’d brought her back some strawberry earrings and matching t-shirt.
I’m not sure why I lied. I guess I really wanted to have brought her something, but those things were all too expensive. Instead, I asked my mom if we could make some earrings and t-shirts like I saw at the festival. I used one of my t-shirts and puff-painted strawberries all over it. I can’t quite picture it in my head now, but I’m fairly positive it was the fugliest t-shirt ever created. I also made some tiny Fimo clay strawberries and baked them in the oven. Drew dots on them with a Sharpie for seeds. Hot-glued them onto cheap French hooks. Also extremely hideous, I am sure. My friend … liked them? I guess? I don’t remember her reaction. At the time I thought I was pretty clever, that she would never know that I made them myself! That she would feel special because I’d spent money on her. Isn’t that so funny, how kids are. Now a hand-made gift means so much. Growing up poor, making our own things instead of buying them, it was embarrassing to give a friend a hand-made present. Now I give people hand-made presents all the time, in food form.
Which brings me back around to strawberry ice cream after our brief detour down Memory Lane!
Strawberry Ice Cream Recipe
Serve it in a teacup for extra cuteness
For something healthier, try this maple syrup-sweetened frozen yogurt recipe!
And for something even healthier still, try strawberry kale salad!
PrintStrawberry Ice Cream
- Prep Time: 1 hour
- Total Time: 1 hour
- Yield: 8 1x
Ingredients
- 1 pint (1/2 quart) strawberries, hulled
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
- 1/2 cup milk
Instructions
- Combine strawberries, sugar and vanilla in a food processor and pulse a few times until coarsely pureed.
- Stir that in with the cream and milk. Stir briskly a few times to dissolve the sugar.
- Cover. Refrigerate at least 1 hour and up to a day.
- Freeze in your ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions.
- Serve immediately, soft-serve style, or pack into a container and cover tightly. Place in your freezer for an hour to firm up.
- Store tightly covered in the freezer for up to a week. Beyond that, the texture may become icy.
Notes
Fresh or frozen strawberries can be used. Thaw frozen berries first and keep any liquid that drains from them.
16 Comments
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Your timing is perfect! I was just looking for a strawberry ice cream recipe.
Yay! Perfect timing for a perfect ice cream recipe, Rob! 😉 Hope you enjoy! Happy 4th!
Making homemade ice cream was always my family’s tradition on 4th of July. My grandparents used to make brown bread ice cream. It’s basically vanilla ice cream with grape nuts in it. It was a bummer when I was a kid, but now that I’m older I catch myself jonesing for it now and then. If you’re feelin’ really retro (or poor, or ice cream machine-less) you can put your ice cream mixture into a coffee can and stick that coffee can into a larger one filled with salt, seal the can, and roll it back and forth until it’s done!
My favorite ice cream flavor is boring old vanilla.
Wow, Morgan! I love that brown bread ice cream idea. I’ve never heard of it, but GrapeNuts always remind me of my grandma, too. She had grape nuts for breakfast every day of my life I can remember.
Thank you for sharing the coffee can trick! Several people ask how to make it without a machine.
-hilah
Hey Hilah, great video on Strawberry Ice Cream! We have ice cream fans here, but have never had an ice cream maker. Would you recommend the Cuisinart ICE-20 that you were using? I don’t want to have to fool with ice and salt.
Hey Larry! I do like my cuisinart machine. They are pretty inexpensive and work well for one batch of ice cream. The trade off over the expensive self-chilling machines is you have to make sure the canister has at least 12 hours between uses to full freeze again.
We make sorbets much more often than ice cream, but this strawberry recipe looks muy yummy. Will definitely give it a try!
I actually have a question about your chopping thingy. Is it an attachment of your immersion blender? Can you share what brand it is?
Thankie!
Luc
Hi Luc!
Yes, the chopper thing came with my KitchenAid immersion blender. It came with several other attachments, but the mini chopper is the one I use most often. Hope you try the ice cream. It is so good and easy.
-hilah
Thankie for the info. Hope you guys had a great 4th! We had buckets of rain!
Luc
I’ve heard of all this rain on the eastern coast and am jealous! 😉
Morgan has the right idea. I also wanted to make ice cream, but didn’t want to invest in an ice cream machine. So, I used the coffee can method to make your strawberry ice cream recipe and it turned out so excellent, I made a video. Of course, I cross-posted it on Twitter and in the Hilah Cookig G+ Community page.
P.S. to Morgan: I grew up in New Hampshire and one of my favorite ice cream flavors there was Grape-Nut; my other favorite was “Frozen Pudding” (rum flavor with walnuts, raisins, and a combination of red, black, and green maraschino cherries).
Hello Hilah,
Do you have a dairy free version of this recipe? Thank you for the education.
Hey Paul!
If you like the taste of coconut milk, you can use part full-fat (for the cream) and part low-fat coco milk!
HILAH,
. Thanks for taking me down memory lane. I also grew up poor in a Navy family on a farm. We raised a acre of strawberries and us kids { 3 girls } picked them. We had a Strawberry stand and the money was split between us girls. Fourth of July was the Big Day to haul out the hand cranked Ice Cream maker. Thanks for the Recipe, Holly.
So simple! I must try this. When I was a kid, my Mama always made home made chocolate banana ice cream. It was out of this world delicious!
That sounds delicious, David! I’ve never even heard of chocolate banana ice cream.