Peach Sorbet

I made peach sorbet over the weekend, but forgot to blog about it until I saw another peach recipe photo on my phone today. Found a good sounding recipe at the Food Network. Surprisingly, none of my ice cream books (I have three, plus had another one checked out) had a recipe. (I think I found one later in Joy of Cooking.) BTW, sorbet has no dairy. Sherbet has no cream but does have milk.

I actually followed the recipe for once, so I will just link to Curtis Aiken's Peach Sorbet. The recipe for simple syrup provides far more than you need for one sorbet recipe. I did 3 cups each of water and sugar and ended up with about 4 cups of syrup. I need to make more sorbet, but we haven't finished it yet. It's been cooler (and actually raining, but mostly just cloudy till today when it's been pouring) so ice cream just isn't as on the top of the head as during summer. (Summer is over in Maine. It lasted about 4 weeks this year, split in two sections. I love summer in Maine.)

The sorbet is like eating a frozen peach with extra sugar. Frankly, I could just eat a peach and be happy. But we have so many peaches to use up, it's another way to preserve them a bit and eat a few more each day. I've also put some in the freezer and started drying them. And we each eat about 1.5 peaches a day.

More garlic bread

I did make more garlic bread Monday night. The bread is hard to cut in half, being rather dense and not very thick, with a hard crust. So I was cutting very carefully, worried about slipping, but telling my self it would be pretty difficult to hurt myself since the knife moved pretty slowly. And then I hit the center, where my two cuts met and suddenly it wasn't so difficult anymore and the knife went into my finger.

Arrrgh!

Unfortunately, Eric was cutting up jalapeno peppers for his salsa so he certainly wasn't going to help me. The bathroom closet door was locked so Nutmeg couldn't get a bandaid for me, if she could even reach that shelf. And I was bleeding quite a bit. Luckily, I managed to get it taken care of. The cut isn't terrible, and is more wide than deep. And we were lucky to have a set of finger bandaids, including ones for fingertips. They are awesome. We will definitely keep these in stock. (They are water blocking, too, which is so nice for fingers.)

Back to the bread--I used about 3 Tbs of butter this time and it didn't pour off the bread onto the pan (just a little bit when I cut it up). I used the same herbs and garlic, since that's the best part.

The peach ice cream, by the way, is delicious! We're having small servings each night to make it last. I'm looking forward to trying peach sherbet or sorbet next. I should remember to try those more often--one of them doesn't use any cream and then I wouldn't have to wait to get to the grocery store. We tend to make vanilla ice cream the most, however. I've never heard of vanilla sherbet/sorbet. Can you make either of those without fruit? Oh, I could try apple! Always have lots of apples around.

Peach ice cream

The Connecticut peaches came in to the farmer this week. Some are already ripe enough to eat, so we dove into them yesterday, including peach ice cream. The base recipe is based on the sweet cream II recipe in Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book (Amazon link) with the peach from their peach recipe. We thought the sweet cream base was too rich, and tried it with many variations on amounts of heavy cream, half & half, whole milk, 2% milk, and skim milk over the years. Basically, as long as you have 2 2/3 c of milk & cream, it's okay. The more cream, the richer the ice cream, of course. We used to use some half & half all the time. It took me a couple years to realize that using half & half was purposeless, as I could just use half cream and half milk instead.

Peach Ice Cream

•  2 cups chopped peaches (just two peaches)
• 1/2 sugar

Macerate in the fridge for 2 hours, stirring occasionally if you remember to do so. (Macerate: Something I've been doing with fruit and sugar since I was kid, but only learned the name of recently. Basically, it just means put fruit and sugar together and let them sit to draw out the juice and soften the fruit.) Mash remaining peaches or leave chunky as desired. We like them mashed but not quite pureed.

• 1 c heavy cream
• 3/4 c sugar
• 1 2/3 c skim milk

Put cream in a bowl. Slowly add sugar and whisk till you can't hear the sugar granules anymore. Whisk another 1-2 minutes. Add skim milk. Drain juice from peaches and add.

Let chill for 2+ hours in the fridge. Freeze according to the ice cream maker directions. If using mashed peaches, put them in when freezing is about half done. If left as chunks, put in when 2-5 minutes remain.

I have a manual crank new fashioned ice cream maker. I love it! The electric ones are terribly loud. And use electricity. The new ones all have a metal container with a special gel inside (like freezer packs have) so you don't need ice and rock salt. This one, Salton brand, is the only one that doesn't plug in that I could find. Sure, it takes paying attention to it every 1-3 minutes for 30 minutes. But it gives you the fun of cranking your own ice cream. Nutmeg loves helping to make ice cream.

And it was delicious! We will probably make more this week. And with frozen peaches later in the year.

Roasted banana ice cream

For unknown reasons, a recipe for Roasted Banana Ice Cream (scroll way down past the interview for the recipe) caught my eye recently. I made it Sunday and we had it last night. I didn't set out to make three banana dishes; it just kind of happened. And, to my dismay, turns out my brother isn't a big banana fan. But he did enjoy all three dishes anyway!

I had two problems with the ice cream. First, it says to roast the bananas for 40 minutes. My burned at about minute 35. Luckily, I was right there so I rescued most of it. But I did lost a good bit of bananas and most of the caramelized sauce. One commenter suggested putting in raw banana for more flavor, so I just put in half a raw banana. I later realized why this happened: 1. I have a baking stone I always leave in the oven since I bake bread so much. The roasting was on top of this. Probably a bad idea. 2. It called for a 2 quart pan, which was weird since usually baking pans are in inches. So I just used my 9x13 pan, which put them all on one layer. After the single stir, it was more like a few bunches of mashed banana rather than coating the whole pan. Yesterday I realized a 2 quart pan would be a casserole dish (in which, of course, you only make hot dish, not casserole). That would have about 1/2 the surface area. Will try again as it was a neat taste.

The second problem is that it froze very quickly in my ice cream machine. And then it became hard as a rock in my freezer. I've only had that happen once or twice before. We had to microwave the ice cream to get it out in time to eat before Ninja class! I'm not sure why this happens (one of my ice cream books would probably tell me why). Perhaps the fat content?

The major modification I made is that I had skim milk and 2% but not the called-for whole. I usually use heavy cream and skim for my ice cream, so I was going to get cream. But the store didn't have any in my preferred brand, so I got 1/2 and 1/2. Which I thought would get me in the vicinity of whole when mixed with skim. As I was about to make the mix, I checked my ice cream book and found a chart of fat content. 1/2 and 1/2 is about 30% fat while whole is about 4%. Whoa! I needed a whole lot of skim and not much of that to equal whole milk! I guesstimated and did 1.5 cups skim and 1/2 c 1/2 and 1/2.

Or maybe the sugar, since I ended up with less of the caramelized sauce than planned.

No picture as it's not a pretty ice cream. It's rather brown with bits of darker brown in it. Quite yummy. We also put Reese's Magic Shell on top (chocolate and peanut butter and bananas, oh wow!).