when strawberry season and ice cream season collide
a recipe for — you guessed it — strawberry frozen custard
Last week, I saw the good news that Ted Drewes, purveyor of the universe’s greatest frozen custard, will be re-opening its South Grand location in St. Louis this summer. It’s the original, but much smaller, Ted Drewes, and it had been closed since the start of the pandemic. I thought it might’ve closed for good, and something about its return made me positively giddy. It also got me thinking about ice cream, and how our greatest season, frozen dessert season, is upon us.
I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far into the newsletter without writing about — or eating — frozen custard. Today ends that drought.
When I was in high school, my mom bought a small, white Cuisinart ice cream maker, which I thought was the most novel implement to have ever graced a kitchen counter. I grew up in St. Louis, where you practically need gills to breathe the summer air, and I had the kind of charmed childhood where June through August was a fog of chlorine and frozen Snickers bars. The grill was always smoking, and I was always wearing a half-damp swimsuit.
And there was ice cream. So much ice cream. Cones at Baskin-Robbins, frozen custard from Ted Drewes, knockoff concretes from a strip-mall spot called Lix, which changed its name to Silky’s at some point, though we kept right on calling it Lix. The first summer I could drive, I went for ice cream every night, toting a friend or my brother or a kid I was babysitting. I’m not sure when, exactly, my mom thought I’d use the Cuisinart.
There just wasn’t time. Summer days were slow, but the nights went fast, with graduation parties and late lifeguarding shifts and another friend to see before she left for college. Ice cream wasn’t for making. It was for eating, fast and messy. It was sticky lips and upset stomachs and sitting in the open trunk of your best friend’s car.
But one night after my senior year of high school, my friends wound up in my parents’ kitchen. It was dark out before we took out the machine and thumbed through the instruction manual. We had cream, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract. We talked and looked at Facebook, a novelty in 2006, while a few of us measured and scraped and eventually flipped the little ice cream maker on. It churned, and we waited, and the finished product was soft and not too far off from soupy, but there was no time to chill it — not that we had anywhere to be. We grabbed spoons and poured the ice cream into a Tupperware, jockeying for bites. My mom passed through the kitchen and took photos. I refused to look up.
Nights like that — with friends, when you plan to cook, when there’s so much to say, when you lose track of time — are unbeatable. You’re starving and out later than you’d planned, but the food always tastes better that way. Half-melted ice cream is the platonic ideal.
This winter, a family friend sent my husband and me the KitchenAid ice cream making attachment as a wedding gift, and the first thing I thought about was that night, almost 17 years ago. I hadn’t made ice cream since, and I vowed to start again this summer. Then, on Saturday, I went strawberry picking and brought home a gallon-sized bucket. When I realized I had cream and buttermilk in my fridge and no plans for the rest of the day, I figured I didn’t really have a choice.
slightly boozy strawberry-buttermilk frozen custard
adapted from this Bon Appétit recipe
Pick some fresh strawberries, or buy some at your farmer’s market. Hurry! Strawberry season doesn’t go on forever, and this is so, so much better with fruit that hasn’t traveled by plane, train and automobile to get to you.
Hull and slice about about 1½ cups of strawberries into a smallish bowl; you should end up with about 1 cup once you’re finished. It doesn’t matter how you cut them, necessarily, since you’ll be mashing them later, but I generally think a quarter-inch slice is the right move.
Next — and you can skip this step if you want your frozen custard to be kid-friendly — pour about 2 tablespoons of your favorite apertivo over the strawberries and give them a stir to combine. I used Cocchi Americano and liked that flavor profile; you want to pick something that doesn’t have a super strong taste on its own. Once you’ve drowned the strawberries in booze, set the bowl aside and let the liquor do its thing.
Next, whisk 8 egg yolks and 1 cup of sugar in a medium bowl. Bring 2 cups of heavy cream to a simmer in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. Once the cream is simmering, lower the temperature to medium-low, and then pour about half of it into the egg/sugar mixture and begin whisking it immediately, tempering the eggs and allowing the mixture to come slowly up to temperature.
Once it’s combined, add everything in the bowl back into the saucepan with the remaining simmering cream. Start stirring immediately and don’t stop; you should keep your mixture simmering but never let it reach a boil. Stir! Stir! Stir! Keep stirring for 5-6 minutes, until your custard is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Don’t worry if there are teeny, tiny bits of orange cooked egg yolk. We’ll solve that problem next.
Solution: Pour the custard through a strainer into a bowl. Let it cool to room temperature. Wash the strainer.
Next, while the custard cools, take the back of a spoon or a potato masher to the strawberries and pulverize them. You want uneven chunks, almost like a really thick and non-uniform jam. Pour the strawberries through your strainer quickly, just getting rid of the excess alcohol and super-watery juice. Put the (still very juicy) strawberry mixer into a new bowl, and pop it in the fridge.
Once your custard is at room temperature, whisk in 2 cups of buttermilk, 1 cup of crème fraîche (bonus points if you can find vanilla bean crème fraîche, which I did at Trader Joe’s), 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and ½ a teaspoon of a salt. Cover the custard mixture, put it in the fridge, and chill it for an hour.
Once it’s finished chilling, get out your ice cream maker! Set it up according to the instructions for your particular model, and pour the custard/buttermilk/crème fraîche mixture in and let it do its thing. (If you’re using the KitchenAid attachment, you can plan to churn for 25-30 minutes.)
No matter how long you need to churn for, you’re going to save the strawberries for last. Once your ice cream starts to come together, when there’s 5-10 minutes left to churn, that’s when you add them. Keep the ice cream maker going and pour them in, letting them swirl throughout.
Once you’ve got something that resembles soft ice cream, you’re all set. If you’re a glutton, eat some immediately; otherwise, scoop it into a freezer-friendly container and let it set for an hour or two.
Notes: I recommend getting some kind of double-walled ice cream storage container if you’re going to make ice cream at home more than once a year. They’re cheap and really do make a different when it comes to freezer burn, since homemade ice cream always seems much more fragile against the elements, compared with store-bought stuff.