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Almost-Instant Sweet Wine Ice Cream
Recipe Review

2009_08_21-wineicecream.jpgWe've talked about serving wine with ice cream before; what about wine in your ice cream? (Pssst ... no ice cream maker required!)

 
 

We discovered this intriguing recipe for Almost-Instant Sweet Wine Ice Cream in a back issue of BBC Good Food magazine. Like Philadelphia-style ice cream, it's more delicate tasting and faster to make than egg custard-based ice creams. By itself, we found the ice cream pleasant but not spectacular. However, it was heavenly paired with fresh blackberries – our new favorite version of berries and cream. (Serving it with other summer fruits like peaches would be fantastic, too.)

It uses just three ingredients: dessert wine, cream, and sugar. The nearly effortless preparation consists of mixing the wine and sugar together, and then gradually whisking in the cream until the mixture thickens. Pop it into the freezer for a few hours and voilà – sweet, soft ice cream with no churning or special equipment required. The consistency is creamy and slightly icy yet not too flaky.

Despite the simple ingredients list and method, we were required make an adjustment. The original recipe calls for double cream, which has a fat content of 48% and is not available in the U.S. (What a crime!) We used a heavy whipping cream with 40% fat, instead. Fortunately, the result was not disastrous. Double cream would likely have been better, but it was not essential.

For the wine, we chose a sweet Muscat Canelli with flavors of apricot and peach. Tasting the mixture before freezing it, we were tempted to add a bit more booze than the recipe called for, but we weren't sure how the additional alcohol might affect freezing. We're glad we stuck to the original measurements; the flavor intensified during freezing and ended up being noticeable but not overpowering.

One more note: the recipe calls for caster sugar, which is equivalent to superfine sugar in the U.S.

• Get the recipe: Almost-Instant Sweet Wine Ice Cream, from Good Food

Related: Roundup: Boozy Granitas

(Image: Emily Ho)

Tags

Recipe Review, wine, ice cream, muscat

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Comments (2)

Oh wow, I'm definitely going to try this one. This is so much like Nigella Lawson's Margarita Ice-cream which I tried earlier this year.
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posted by Chilli on August 23rd 2009 at 12:37am
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Tried it twice, once with a moscato and once with riesling. Turned out just fabulous both times. Paired it with a pear upside-down cake once. It was a huge hit! Thanks for giving me another non-ice-cream-maker recipe for ice-cream!

posted by Chilli on January 21st 2010 at 11:43am
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