Yearn, No Churn

Up there’s the ice cream maker, a pricey investment now collecting dust on a shelf somewhere in the years between its uses.  Even when the machine’s pulled into service, making good ice cream is so much work.  The constant trips to and from the freezer.  All that churning, too.  There’s no other way to enjoy fresh homemade ice cream, though.

That is, not until wonderfully inventive Spanish chef Ferran Adrià came up with a quick and surprisingly simple solution, namely, blending condensed milk and frozen fruit.  Instant soft serve or, after a brief stay in the freezer, firmer ice cream in the more traditional style.  Genius!

Food & Wine reported Adrià’s innovation in its September 2018 issue, which in turn inspired the quartet of summer refreshers you see above (proceeding clockwise from the top): Strawberry, Peach, Blueberry and Tropical.  Three of the flavors are self-explanatory, whereas the fourth, Tropical, takes cubed pineapples, mangoes and papayas and blends them with passion fruit juice.  Here are some of the latter two before their preparation and deep freeze:

Below are all four of today’s creations, straight from the freezer, and before service:

As this suggests, these all spent a couple hours in the freezer to firm them up, making them suitable for various applications.  They may be served in a dish, as in today’s feature photo, or they may be enjoyed in a cone.  Here’s a scoop of blueberry:

Not the best picture, true, but try holding an ice cream cone in one hand, while manipulating a camera phone with the other.  It was a beautiful day for ice cream, too, with temperatures and humidity near their upper limits, though these made the ice cream drippy and the cone, seemingly destined for disaster.  You only can imagine what happened seconds after the picture above.  No comment but…Oh wow, what a luscious (yet sublime) mess!

Adrià, you’ve done it!  The chef who created what was widely acclaimed as the world’s top restaurant (El Bulli) has lent his wizardry to the seemingly impossible task of improving summers.  Too bad for ice cream makers, though, because now the machines will be stuck forever up on that back closet shelf.

*****

Almost-Instant Soft Serve

• 1 and 1/2 pounds frozen fruit (*1, *2)
• 3/4 cup sweetened condensed milk (*3)
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• pinch of salt

Put all ingredients in a food processor and pulse until fruit in finely-chopped, then process steadily until the mixture is smooth, 3 to 4 minutes.  With a spatula, scrape down the sides of the processor from time-to-time, as needed.

Serve immediately for soft serve or, if a firmer texture is desired, put mixture into a container, cover the ice cream closely with plastic wrap, and freeze for about 2 to 3 hours.  If the latter, let sit at room temperature ten minutes before serving.

NOTES:

1 – Any variety of fruit you can imagine would be a splendid choice.  The article suggests strawberries, blueberries and mangoes, which I accepted, and then improvised.  It doesn’t necessarily even have to be a single kind of fruit; a combination, as with Tropical, works well.

2 – If you have a little frozen fruit left over, a good idea is to chop it coarsely with a knife, and then to mix it in with the ice cream before freezing.  As you can see, this is precisely what I did with the few peaches that remained in the bag.

3 – This is a little under the amount you’d find in can.  At least that’s true of the cans sold in North America.