Ice Cream Recipe Review: Rose Levy Beranbaum's Strawberry Ice Cream

  “Strawberry Ice Cream” on page 55 of Rose's Ice Cream Bliss by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

• The online recipe can be found here. (see below for instructions for using fresh or frozen strawberries rather than puree).
• My other strawberry ice cream reviews can be found here.

This flavor is a challenge, I admit. Strawberries, being the wateriest of fruits, can make it difficult to achieve a smooth texture. Many churners resort to making strawberries-and-cream styles (vanilla ice cream with ribbons of strawberry jam), or they use less strawberry puree, resulting in more dilute flavor. My own recipe from 15 years ago has a wonderful flavor, but when frozen hard, it gets a little icy.

This recipe, while very very good, didn't result in as intensely strawberry flavor as I'd like. I know that fresh strawberry ice cream can be pure manna, so I plan to persevere until I've got a more intensely-flavored, silky-smooth strawberry ice cream. 

Substitutions and Techniques:

• Turbinado sugar instead of white sugar (always), as I prefer the flavor.
• The online recipe is a variation that uses commercially-made puree.  If you are using frozen/fresh strawberries, here's what you should do instead:
• Freeze 20 ounces of strawberries (if using fresh strawberries only). 
• Place frozen strawberries in a colander over a bowl and let thaw (several hours at room temp, a couple of days in the fridge). 
• Stir the berries and gently press until you have about 7 tbsp or 1/2 cup of juice collected in the bowl 
• Place the strawberry juice, 1/4 cup of sugar, and 2 tsp of lemon juice in a large glass 4-cup measuring cup (you MUST use at least this size of cup for the next step to prevent boil-overs).
• Cook the juice in the microwave on high for 30 seconds at a time, stirring after every 30-second blast.  Repeat until it has reduced to about 1/4 of the original volume. It will be thick and a little syrupy.
• Puree the pulp from the strawberries and combine it with the cooked strawberry syrup.
• Follow the online recipe as written, using your homemade sweetened strawberry puree in place of the commercial puree. Don't add additional lemon juice - it's already in the puree that you made.
• I omitted the drops of strawberry essence called for in the original recipe (it's not listed in the online version).
• Because my strawberry syrup amount was off and I used all of the sweetened puree (slightly more than the recipe calls for), I added 1 tbsp of milk powder to the custard. I probably shouldn't have done that, as now I don't know how it would have turned out without it.
• I just mashed the strawberry pulp instead of pureeing it in a food processor. I probably should have pureed it. 
• I used tapioca starch instead of cornstarch at a 1:1 substitution. I stirred the milk/starch slurry into the custard just after removing it from the heat.
• I used glucose.

Results:

• Same day: Soft-serve texture is good, and the flavor is nicely strawberry-ish. I'd like it to be stronger yet, though.
• Next day: This is wonderfully scoop-able, even hard-frozen. I'm not sure if it's due to the mashing (instead of pureeing), but I can detect the strawberry seeds, something I don't recall from previous batches of this flavor. But it's far smoother than the recipe I developed 15 years ago.  The flavor is still very good.    

Uses:

• I left it plain, but I think a ribbon of strawberry sauce/ripple or macerated strawberry compote would be delicious and intensify the flavor nicely.
• Topping it with chocolate sauce or adding chocolate or toasted white-chocolate stracciatella to the ice cream would be yummy.
• Maybe stir in some sort of candied graham crackers to add crunch and suggest a strawberry pie?