Other posts on this topic: Strawberry Week Day One: Strawberry Hand Pies, Strawberry Week Day Two: Strawberry Jam.

We bought an ice cream maker I don’t know how many years ago, but it’s been sitting in one of the kitchen cabinets almost ever since. Adam LOVES ice cream, but the recipes that came with the machine were terrible. We accidentally made some awesome chocolate ice cream one Christmas, when I messed up the pudding for this. Turns out it was a perfect ice cream base, but I couldn’t repeat the happy accident–I just kept making perfect pudding, dagnabbit! And then I bought this book to get creative, but it all sounded so intimidating and complicated. So, you know, we we were all on board with the homemade ice cream idea. But it just never came together.

But I’ve made a lot of custards, puddings, bechamels, caramels, etc. since then. My comfort level with a cooked milk recipe is much higher now, and strawberry ice cream just happens to be Adam’s absolute favorite.

So when I threw the last quart and a half of strawberries in the freezer until I decided what to do with them, I kind of already knew it would be ice cream. I just had to get past the mental block about our ice cream maker.

I’m glad I did.

This is an Emeril recipe. There are tons of recipes out there, I just happened to pick this one. It’s awesome. I’ve never even been a fan of strawberry ice cream which, to me, is one of the most artificial-tasting flavors you can buy. But made fresh it’s a game changer. It suddenly makes the whole British Wimbledon obsession with strawberries and cream make perfect sense. It makes the strawberries taste more like strawberries than you could possibly imagine, with this glorious smooth and creamy finish. It’s heavenly. I made 2 quarts of the stuff, and even when I ended up changing half of this recipe as I ran out of ingredients (I cooked the egg in my first batch when H had a tiny meltdown) or messed up the sugar measurement (it’s listed twice in the ingredients list, took me a minute to catch) it was perfection. And would be perfection even with frozen strawberries. I’ve posted the notes for my changes below.

Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream
(Yields 1.5 quarts–mine was a little more like 2 quarts)

1 quart fresh strawberries, washed, stemmed and quartered (**I had a quart and a pint, I used it all)
2 1/2 cups granulated sugar (**I ended up using 3 cups of sugar)
4 cups half-and-half (**I used 2 cups whole milk, 2 cups heavy cream)
1/2 vanilla bean, split in half and scraped (**I…just realized that I completely forgot to add any vanilla. Oh, well!)
6 egg yolks

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