One of the most elusive and yet most delicious ice cream recipe is Lemon. It's a sad reflection on poor development of taste and smell that this flavour doesn't justify pride of position in more store refrigerators. Happily, the solution is at hand; if you have your own ice cream maker that is. With ice cream makers really cheaply available now there really is no reason to keep on eating the artificial stuff that everyone else does. Nothing beats a great homemade ice-cream recipe. First of all, the ingredients. You're going to need 600ml of double cream, 300ml of milk, 4 largish lemons, 3 medium eggs, icing sugar and castor sugar. Start by zesting the lemons. An easy way to do this is to take a grater with small teeth and grate the lemon like a block of cheese. There's no need to run too deep, it's just the bright yellow zest that you want. Roughly collect the zest from all 4 lemons. It doesn't matter if you're not too thorough, the zest of 4 lemons is more than enough. Next squeeze the lemons. A cheap hand squeezer is going to be fine for this. Just chop the lemons in half one at a time and juice them. Once you have all the lovely lemon juice, mix it in with the lemon zest and poor them both into a glass that you have two the same of. The reason for this is that you're going to want ½ as much icing sugar as you have collected zest and juice so measure out the icing sugar in a glass next to the juice and zest to get half. Empty the icing sugar into the lemon mixture give it a good stir and pop it into the fridge. The next step is to create the sweet cream ice cream base. For this, crack the 3 eggs into a mixing bowl, combine with about 450ml of castor sugar, and blend using a hand blendor until the sugar is combined with the egg. Add the double cream and milk to the egg and sugar and mix them together. It's now time to get the ice-cream maker out and get going with chilling and churning. I found the best way to stop the ice cream from curdling when adding the lemon and sugar mixture is to do it at a low temperature. For this reason I tend to stick the sweet cream base in the ice cream maker first to start it off, move the lemon syrup into the freezer for 10 minutes and then combine the two in the ice-cream maker. They need a good stir in the ice-cream maker but doing it this way produces the smoothest, creamiest, yummiest lemon ice-cream you will have ever tasted.
Lemon Curd (Makes about 3 cups of curd) 1 cup unsalted butter 1 ⅔ cups sugar 3 tablespoons finely grated lemon zest 4 large eggs 1 cup fresh lemon juice (about 4 large lemons) 1 teaspoon cornstarch Ice Cream 1 300 mL tin sweetened condensed milk 2 tablespoons instant skim milk powder 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 2 cups 2% milk ½ cup whipping cream 1 cup Lemon Curd, chilled
Lemon Curd (Makes about 3 cups of curd) 1. For the lemon curd, melt the butter, sugar and lemon zest in a saucepot over medium heat until the butter melts fully (the sugar will not dissolve at this point). Whisk the eggs lemon juice and cornstarch together and whisk this into the pot. Continue to whisk the curd over medium heat until it thickens and just begins to bubble, about 8 minutes. Pour this through a strainer and cover the surface of the curd with plastic wrap. Cool the curd to room temperature, then chill completely. Ice Cream 1. For the ice cream, whisk the condensed milk with the skim milk powder and vanilla. Whisk in the milk and whipping cream until smooth. 2. Pour the ice cream into an ice cream maker following manufacturer’s instructions and churn until almost set. Fill a piping bag fitted with a large tip with the lemon curd. 3. During the last minute of churning, quickly pipe in the lemon curd through the top of the ice cream maker and stop the machine before the curd becomes fully blended into the ice cream. Scrape the ice cream into a container and freeze until firm, about 4 hours, before scooping to serve. 4. The ice cream will keep for about 2 weeks.