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.

Multifunctional Ice Cream - A Recipe For Success?

I have tried countless ice cream recipes in my time but the 'recipe' I read about today was something I've never encountered before - multifunctional ice cream.

Apparently, food scientists from the University of Missouri have been busy trying to create a healthier ice cream by adding four key ingredients: antioxidants, dietary fibre, prebiotics and probiotics. It all sounds fine in theory but apparently each of these 4 ingredients has its own impact on the texture and/or taste of the ice cream.

Given that the texture and taste of ice cream lies at the very heart of what makes ice cream so appealing (in my view anyway!), it looks like the scientists have quite a challenge on their hands.

Hats off to them for trying to make us all that little bit healthier of course but I still think that ice cream is like many things in life - a little of what you fancy now and then does you good. So for now I'll stick to my occasional rich homemade ice cream full of taste and texture :)