A goal for this summer was to make homemade ice cream with the kids. It sounded educational, not to mention yummy. However, this was one of those things, like dissecting owl pellets from a mail-order company, that sounded fantastic in theory but that quickly fell to the bottom of my enthusiasm pile when I looked at prices (have you checked out the prices on owl pellets lately? Wow). Anyway, when I was out running one Saturday morning I ran past a garage sale where there was an ice cream maker for $5. I begged the man to hold it from me, than I ran the last half-mile at 5:30 pace (honestly! I was kickin' it). Four minutes later I was the proud owner of a beautiful and brand new ice-cream maker.
Since then I have more than gotten my money's worth. My first endeavor was homemade vanilla ice cream. Instead of using the directions on the package I went with the more elaborate and multi-step recipe from Cook's Illustrated. It turned out beyond good. Smooth, not at all icy, and delicious.
Later that same week, I had a fridge full of blackberries. Now, we can only eat so many blackberries. What to do with the rest? Well, a quick Google search gave me a recipe for Blackberry Sorbet. I subbed one pint of blueberries (since I was overrun with those, too) and I cannot explain how good the sorbet was. I would post a picture but there is none left!
The only other thing I did differently was to pre-freeze a large metal pan and then transfer the churned sorbet straight from the ice cream maker into the pan. According to Cook's Illustrated, it helps the texture turn out less icy. Same with the ice cream.
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