Yuzu & Strasberry, Juicy Fruit For Ice Cream

Most of the people who visit my ice cream recipes website look for recipes to make their own delicious homemade ice cream and generally speaking the most popular searches are for vanilla and chocolate. Fruit ice cream flavors are further down the list with strawberry at the top followed by banana. Other fruits are less popular and that's probably because most of them make better sorbets than traditional creamy ice cream (or gelato).

Juicy fruits are wonderful of course in their own right and my favorite is a classic, simple fresh fruit cocktail with apple, pear, pineapple and nectarine. So when I read a news item announcing a fruit that I've never heard of before, it grabs my immediate attention. This week I came across just such a new fruit - the Yuzu.

Regarded by some (apparently) as the world's sexiest fruit and favored by many top chefs in their cuisine, the yuzu is a citrus fruit that originates from East Asia. It looks like a small grapefruit and tastes a little like one with a hint of mandarin and lemon. The good thing about the yuzu is that one piece of the fruit has 3 times more vitamin C than a standard lemon. Popular in East Asia for a long time, yuzu is set to become much more commonplace on Western restaurant menus and as a flavoring in foods on supermarket shelves. So what about yuzu ice cream?

orange sorbet

Well, I haven't as yet made some but when I do I will probably use my simple orange sorbet recipe as a guideline - ie:

a) make a sugar syrup from water, sugar and zest
b) when thoroughly chilled, add to it the yuzu juice
c) transfer to the ice cream maker for churning/freezing

More details on my sorbet recipes page here.

It's not the first time I've got excited about a new fruit and how to make it into ice cream. Back in 2008, I had great fun with a batch of fresh strasberries (that's no typo, I really mean strasberries!).

Within 48 hours of reading a news article I had got hold of some strasberries and made my own strasberry ice cream. Sweet, chunky and creamy it was one of the best fruit ice creams I've ever had.

Titanic Ice Cream Remembered A Century On

The story of what happened to RMS Titanic has touched millions of hearts around the world over the years and we have seen many books, movies and tv documentaries dedicated to the subject.  This weekend, as many people realise, is the 100th anniversary of the tragedy. Today it is exactly 100 years since the ship struck an iceberg at approx 11.40pm and in the early hours of tomorrow morning 15 April around 2.20am, it will be 100 years since the ship disappeared beneath the waves of the deep Atlantic Ocean.

It seems like only yesterday but it was in fact was 4 years ago this month that I wrote a blog post entitled Ice Cream Class Distinction On RMS Titanic. My family has been interested in the Titanic story for many years - 3 generations in fact - and with my passion for making ice cream I wanted to learn about the food served on Titanic and find out if ice cream had beeen on the menu. The fact that it was on both the 1st and 2nd class menus on 14 April 1912 - the last day the ship ever saw daylight - was quite a revelation. Moreover, there had been a class distinction in the ice cream served!

Just as class distinction prevailed for the ship's accommodation and, sadly, the order in which people were given access to the lifeboats, so it was with ice cream served onboard:
French Ice Cream - for 1st class passengers
American Ice Cream - for 2nd class passengers (see menu)

Image: Second-class dinner menu, RMS Titanic, 14 Apr 1912. Repro ID: F5245. ©Walter Lord Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Courtesy of Royal Museums Greenwich website from whom you can order a high quality print.

Thankfully today, 100 years on from the Titanic tragedy, there are fewer social barriers in society and ice cream can be enjoyed by millions.

Thankfully today there are more safety measures in place so that, hopefully, nothing on the scale of the RMS Titanic tragedy will happen again. May the courage of those involved in the sinking always be remembered.

Ice Cream Is Good For The Memory

I have read so much about ice cream over the years that it never ceases to amaze me what people come up with on the subject.

The benefits of ice cream? Well, we all know how good it makes you feel when you sink your teeth into a glorious ice cream sundae or vanilla ice cream cone on a warm summer's day :)

Apparently, it doesn't end there! According to a recent report,  milk is now believed to help boost the memory. Logically, therefore, it is claimed, any products rich in milk such as ice cream, can also claim to offer that benefit. Some 972 men and women aged 23 to 98 took part in the research so it's believed to have been a broad spectrum based assessment.

Read more in this ice cream and memory article.

Cesar Millan & Ice Cream - Again!

In my last post I talked about Dog Whisperer ice cream - Cesar Millan and ice cream connections. Not long after writing that I found myself watching another show in the series and Cesar made a reference to ice cream. What a coincidence!

Cesar didn't talk about giving ice cream to his dogs or anything like that ... no, he was referring to someone whom he was trying to help handle his dog better. The man (Nate) impressed Cesar so much by his enthusiasm to learn and then get on with implementing the new techniques that Cesar got excited, smiled and said to the camera ...

"He's like a kid who did his homework and he's gonna get ice cream!"

I thought that was a wonderful analogy. Adults, dogs, kids and ice cream all rolled into one. Cesar you could become a real philosopher at this rate! Great stuff :)

More Gelato Recipes

I've written about gelato ice cream before and introduced you to a nice vanilla gelato recipe which you can make at home. Now I have more gelato recipes and wanted to share them with you. I've chosen to cover chocolate and banana which I have read are 2 of the most popular flavors in gelato ice cream:

chocolate gelato (gelato cioccolato)
banana gelato (gelato banana)

The chocolate gelato recipe calls for dark chocolate as an ingredient and although I don't like to eat dark chocolate on its own, I find it super in ice cream or in this case gelato. I'm sure there are other people out there like me! There's something about blending rich chocolate into an ice cream mixture that becomes quite irresistable!

I read an interesting BBC article a couple of years ago about how chocolate can be beneficial to health and it led me to read up more on the subject. What I found was an amazing array of information, anecdotes and research in support of the idea and my chocolate and health web page was written as a result. There's so much to know and understand about chocolate and I'm sure there's still more to be learned.

Ice Cream Machine For A Royal Banquet

Recently I watched a fascinating tv documentary showing Queen Elizabeth II hosting a banquet for a visiting Head of State. The care and attention to detail from the serving staff through to the chefs and kitchen staff was impeccable and not only that but their timing - what to serve, when, what to remove from the table, what to offer and when. I watched with complete admiration for the quality of effort that went into the whole affair. Oh and how wonderful the food looked!

I had just one frustration - I couldn't clearly see what dessert was on the menu. Was it ice cream I wondered? So I started searching on the Internet for what those honoured guests might have eaten.

Courtesy of the official website of the British Monarchy, I found a sample menu from an actual Royal Banquet. Not only that, but it gave the recipes for you to try at home. How wonderful! I wanted to put a link here to the page concerned but according to the official site's Terms they don't allow incoming links without formal permission. So rather than risk being hauled off to the Tower of London, I'll just tell you how to find the web page - go Google and search for "royal recipes to try at home". If you see a page listed with royal.gov in the domain that should be it.

Anyway, back to the point of this article ... I looked for the dessert on the sample 'royal' menu and found it listed as Parfait à la Meringue au Citron (Lemon Meringue Parfait). Then, when I read the recipe, I couldn't help but smile .... the recipe requires the use of an ice cream machine!

So there you have it, if an ice cream machine is needed to make a dessert for a Royal Banquet then that's as good an endorsement as you might ever find to invest in one. I certainly would not be without my ice cream maker!