#5 Black Cherry

Wow! It's been over a week since my last ice cream post. Don't fret, I haven't gone anywhere. Your weekly ice creams are still on the way!

This week features a favorite flavor of mine: Black Cherry.

When I was growing up my dad and I would always get those tiny bottles of Dr. Brown's Black Cherry soda whenever we went to Jerry's Deli. Good times. The only thing is that no other black cherry product ever seems to compare to that soda, except for my grandmother's black cherry jello mould which jiggles into existence every Thanksgiving. Mmm, jello mould! Grandma also makes a lime pineapple jello mould, but only my Aunt eats that one. The neon green color can be a bit off-putting.

Anyway, last year I made a Cherry Chocolate Chip with Rum-Soaked Cherries ice cream which featured fresh cherries reduced into a flavorful sauce and then incorporated into the ice cream base. I also rehydrated dried cherries in rum, because cherries + rum = AWESOME. They basically became a whole new rum delivery system. Captain Jack would be proud.

So, this was my second attempt at a cherry ice cream and this time I used black cherry preserves from France! C'est bon, non?! These preserves were all natural and only had concentrated grape fruit juice and lemon juice to keep them nice and tasty. Since the fruit has natural sugars I reduced the amount of sugar in the ice cream base from 1 cup to 1/2 cup. At first I intended this recipe to be more of a sherbet and I was going to use all whole milk rather than cream, but at the last minute I decided to go with 1 additional cup of milk and 1 additional cup of cream rather than the 3 cups of cream I typically add to base (which already has 1 cup of milk). If you followed that using the right side of your brain then you'll realize that I was a cup short on the milk/cream liquid. That's because I only had 10 oz. of black cherry preserves and I didn't want to dilute the flavor by making too much ice cream. So instead of 2 quarts this recipe produced about 1.5 quarts. /babble

Next there was heating, stirring, whipping, straining, chilling, churning, freezing... the usual stuff.

The final product has a nice purple hue similar to that of my grandmother's black cherry jello mould. Canned bing cherries would be a great mix-in for this ice cream. Unfortunately I didn't realize that until after the fact!

It tastes very sweet, but not necessarily overtly sugary; the sweetness is more reminiscent of the fruit in the preserves rather than the granulated sugar. This ice cream would be perfect on a hot summer day. If I were to put it into popsicle moulds then the end result would be deliciously fruity creamsicles!

These pictures aren't the greatest and I'm still experimenting with accentuating this ice cream... I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I plan to reduce some balsamic vinegar into a sweet sauce to serve as a topping. The balsamic, though sweetened from the reduction, will not be as sweet as the ice cream. The interaction of the two should hopefully result in a beneficial conflict of FLAVORS!