Fresh Plum Ice Cream

Plums are my favorite of the fruits. I could eat an entire bag of plums in one sitting. The problem is that for every delicious, sweet, dripping and perfect plum, I eat probably five or so tart, hard, and not-yet-ready plums in anticipation. Plum season is woefully short. It occupies only a few weeks in August/September (although plums are available much longer). So the trick is to have some ways to use those close-but-no-cigar, not-quite-ready plums to capitalize on their increased availability. 

While making this recipe with in-their-prime plums is ideal (the better your fruit, the better your ice cream), you can extract an incredible amount of sweetness out of the plums through boiling, even if starting with a tart plum. Just the smell and the beautiful color of the plums in the pot will tell you how wonderful your ice cream is going to be. The end result is not overly sugary or cloying (the downfall of many fruit or berry ice creams) or rich. This is a light summer fruit ice cream that we've served with our Meyer Lemon Yogurt Cake in the photos.


This ice cream is also notable because you do not make a custard and you do not use eggs. Simply create your fruit and syrup, add cream, and blend. If you're worried about accidentally cooking the eggs when making custard, but want something with cream and more body and smoothness than a sorbet, this is a great option. The lovely color is all natural from the skin of the plums (which, no, you do not have to peel the plums, and don't worry about slight bruising). Any type of plum will do. Pick the ones most in season. We used red plums, but black or any can work. The recipe was written in David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop for wild plums. We substituted frambois for the kirsch due to what we had on hand.

Serve by itself, with fresh fruit, with cake, or however you want. It makes one quart of ice cream.

 

 

Plum Ice Cream

 

Ingredients

1 pound plums (whatever available, around 5-8 depending on varietal)
1/3 cup water
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon kirsch or frambois

 

Instructions

1. The night before, make sure bowl for ice cream maker is chilling in the freezer.
2. Cut plums in half and remove pits.
3. Cut each half in quarters (approximately 8 slices per plum).
4. Place in medium (3 qt) non-reactive saucepan.
5. Add water. The juices from the plums will create the rest of the necessary moisture.
6. Cover and cook over medium heat for about 8-10 minutes or until tender and easily split without resistance by pressing with the back of a wooden spoon.
7. Remove from heat and stir in sugar until dissolved.
8. Cool to room temperature (about an hour)
9. Once cool, puree in a blender with the heavy cream and framboise until smooth and peels have been broken down as much as humanely possible.
10. Chill mixture, pref. overnight but at least six hours.
11. After thoroughly chilling, start ice cream maker and slowly add plum mixture in a drizzle. Note, this is written for our fairly standard $50 Cuisinart ice cream maker. If your ice cream maker's instructions are different, follow the directions for your ice cream maker.
12. Run ice cream maker until mixture is no longer visibly moving around the scraper, and then wait a couple minutes longer, up to but not over twenty minutes total. This particular ice cream has taken pretty much the whole twenty minutes when we've made it before. If it is still moving at twenty minutes, you should still take it out (unless your ice cream maker says differently). Move to quart sized container and freeze until ready to serve.