Blackberry Ice Cream

Last week I picked blackberries at a local "pick-your-own" place. They were amazing

The berries were so sweet and delicious, I knew they would be perfect for making ice cream.


I started with a recipe I found over on White on Rice Couple but adjusted it a bit to suit what I had on hand, along with a few added inspirations.

My final recipe is as follows:


Ingredients:

• 2 c Whole Milk
• 1 c sugar
• 1 c Heavy Whipping Cream
• 4 Egg Yolks
• 2 inch piece Vanilla Bean
• 2 c pureed Blackberries (I used 20 oz. which is how much I had left by the time I made the ice cream!)
• Zest of 1 Lemon

Instructions:

1. Pour the milk and cream into a pot.
2. Zest your lemon and slice the vanilla bean in half, extracting the seeds with the tip of a knife, and add it all to the pot of milk and cream (including the bean part of the vanilla!).
3. Warm the milk mixture, but be careful not to let it boil!
4. When the milk mixture is steamy, add the sugar.
5. Whisk egg yolks medium bowl. Slowly pour the warm milk mixture into the eggs, stirring constantly. 
6. Pour the milk & egg mixture back into the same pot you already used.
7. Heat the milk & egg mixture over medium heat. Make sure you stir constantly so lumps don't form. Do this until it thickens up a bit. If you have a thermometer, you can stop when the custard reaches 170 degrees farenheit. Pour the custard through a fine mesh strainer into a medium sized metal bowl.
8. Mix in the blackberry puree (also run this through the strainer to separate the seeds!)
9. Stir until cool over an ice bath.
10. If you have the patience, once it's cooled down, chill the custard thoroughly in the fridge for a couple of hours. Otherwise, when it's good and chilled, pour the mixture into your ice cream maker. Make sure your mixture is cold! Adding hot custard to your ice cream maker will only melt the ice in the canister, and you'll end up with soup.
11. Churn in your ice cream maker according to manufacturer's directions.

A couple notes:

I used 1 cup of sugar, but in the end I found it a bit sweet, so I'd probably go with 3/4 of a cup next time. You can always taste your custard at the end and add more sugar if it's not sweet enough, but it's hard to take it out after the fact!

The original recipe called for closer to 24 oz. of blackberries, but I only had 20 oz. so that's what I used, and it turned out great!

Next time I'd go easy on the lemon zest, if not omit it all together. In the end it almost overpowered the blackberry flavor. It was still tasty, but it tasted more like cake batter with blackberry undertones, rather than a very berry flavor.

The nice thing about making ice cream is that it's really flexible. You can adjust the ingredients a little hear and their to suit your tastes, or to try something new. If you ever go to a pick-your-own fruit place, I highly recommend keeping a batch of ice cream in mind.