Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Heat your oven to 450 F. Place the cherries in a baking dish or oven-safe skillet with the sugar (less cleanup if you use the skillet since you can use it later for cooking the fruit puree). Roast until soft, make sure to stir them a few times during the baking time for evenness. This should take about 1 hour and the cherries should be soft enough to easily squash with your fingers with little resistance but not falling apart or mushy.
- When cool enough to handle, gently squash them with your fingers to remove the pits and reserve any roasting juices in the baking dish or skillet. Put the pits in a small sauce pan with the cream and bring to a simmer. Turn the heat off, cover and let them infuse. Place the pitted cherries in a blender or processer, or use a stick blender, and pulse them to get a chunky broken up mixture. You are not looking for a puree here, just to break up the pieces and allow more juices to be released. Place the chopped up cherries back in the roasting skillet or if you used a baking dish transfer them with any juices to a wide skillet.
- Place the skillet over medium heat and cook the mixture stirring frequently to reduce it and thicken it, about 10 minutes. The mixture should look a bit jammy and you can easily see the bottom of the pan when you scrape it.
- Pass the chopped up reduced cherries through a sieve, pressing well and scraping the bottom of the sieve to get every last piece of goodness. You should be able to collect about 560 gr of fruit juice/puree and be left with a good bit of pulp and skin in the sieve. If you end up with way more than 560 gr of fruit puree, return it to the pan and reduce a bit more, but a few grams more or less are not going to matter. That leftover pulp in the sieve is delicious, do not toss it. It is great mixed into scones, muffins or as a topping for yogurt and granola. It lasts a few weeks in the fridge.
- Using the same sieve strain the cherry pit infused cream into the fruit puree. Add lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Chill the mixture in the fridge for at least 4 hours but preferably overnight. Churn in your ice cream maker, pack and freeze. This is an ice cream that should be easily scoopable straight out of the freezer.
Notes
*Leaving the pits in the cherries when you roast them adds a hint of almond-y flavor. That being said, if it is more convenient feel free to pit them first and follow the recipe. If you pit them before roasting, there is obviously no need to infuse the cream with cherry pits and you can add the cream as is to the strained fruit puree. Either way this will still be an awesome cherry ice cream.