In Catalunya, summer can be hot, and hot summers call for lots of gin & tonic, lots of cold crisp white wines, and lots of ice cream!

You can make ice cream with just about any flavour you care to think of, and it is really quite difficult to have an epic fail. What is much harder than getting the flavour right, is getting a wonderful smooth texture, and for me, ice cream is just as much about the texture as it is taste.

The simplest way to make ice cream is literally to freeze cream with sugar, and that’s fine, but the way to get really smooth and lovely ice cream is to start with a…

Custard

Now, I have a bit of a thing for proper custard, made with very fat cream, egg yolks and real vanilla. It’s velvety and unctuous, which are just the qualities that I want in my ice cream, so what better place could there be to start the quest for seriously smooth ice cream than with my favourite traditional custard recipe.

The method for making the custard does not change at all, but the proportion of the ingredients does. If we want to turn the custard into ice cream then we need to add a lot more sugar because you taste the sweetness of the sugar less when it is at a lower temperature. There is also less egg than normal so that it doesn’t set too hard, and there is no need for any cornflour which usually works as a thickening agent.

Ripples

As stunning as a custard based vanilla ice cream is, it can be even better with a ripple of red fruit running through it. I’ve made my recipe deliberately quite sweet, so that I can throw in sour cherries, which just taste amazing. Sadly they have a really short season, but you could also use cranberries, or anything else that is a bit tart. If you want to use a sweeter fruit then cut the amount of sugar in the recipe by 10 or 20 grams.

Machine?

The recipe calls for an ice cream maker, partly because I have one, and partly because that is the only way to get a really smooth result.

Freezing things creates ice crystals. The more whatever it is that you are freezing is moving around, the smaller and more spread out those crystals will be. You simply can’t keep the mixture constantly moving and freezing at the same time without some kind of ice cream maker.

That doesn’t mean that there is no point in giving this a go if you don’t have one though, it just means that your results will be good instead of amazing. Start off by chilling your custard mixture over an ice bath to get it as cold as possible, then pour it into something wide and flat (as opposed to a deep bowl) and put it into the freezer. After about 40 minutes take it out and use a handheld mixer, stick blender, whisk, spatula, or whatever you’ve got, and give it a good stir around, making sure you break up the most frozen bits around the edges. Then return it to the freezer and repeat this procedure about every 30 minutes for the next three hours or so, and you will end up with a pretty good result.

If you live anywhere hot though, an ice cream maker is a great investment, they aren’t expensive at all these days, and just make it all so much easier, as well as giving a better end result.

and so to work…

1. Cut down the length of the vanilla pod, and scrape out the seeds, put both the seeds and the pod itself into a small saucepan, and add the cream to it.

2. If you don’t have a vanilla pod, or do but just don’t want to use something so expensive to make custard, then you can use vanilla extract without too huge a difference to the taste.

3. Put the pan onto the hob at a low heat and bring it up to just below simmering point.

4. While the cream is heating up, put the egg yolks and sugar together in a heatproof bowl, and whisk them together.

5. Take the vanilla pod out of the hot cream, and then slowly pour the cream into the bowl with the eggs and sugar. Keep on whisking it all the time that you are pouring in the cream.

6. Pour the combined mixture back into the saucepan, and put it back on a gentle heat. Keep whisking it as it heats, and as it reaches simmering point it will start to thicken.

7. Pour the custard into something that can go into the fridge, cover it with cling film (this stops a skin forming) and leave it to cool down for a while before you put it in the fridge for about 3-4 hours until it is completely cold.

and freeze!

8. Start the ice maker and pour the custard in slowly, then leave it to churn for about 30 minutes (depending on your machine).

9. While the ice cream is churning, remove the stones from the cherries and roughly chop them. About five minutes before the ice cream has finished throw the cherry pieces into the mixture, so that they get mixed through the ice cream without getting broken up too much.

10. If you can resist for long enough, put the ice cream in the freezer for about two hours to firm it up a bit before you eat.