Nothing like a little pressure, eh? I’ve written a love letter to Jeni’s ice cream already, so I’ll skip the sonnet this time (but seriously.. best ever) and just gush about this particular recipe. It caught my eye when I was paging through my Jeni’s cookbook, planning a recipe for Father’s Day this year. My own father loves strawberry ice cream, and I had bought O a freaking grill so I figure he would be solid eating whatever. I go through phases where I make ice cream constantly, and I was in one at the time… so ice cream it was, and this surely fit the bill. In general, I wouldn’t say strawberry ice cream really provokes tremendous excitement deep down inside for me–I mean.. does it for you? Really?–though I did have a week of nonstop cravings for strawberry ice cream, frosting, and cream cheese. But roast the berries, evaporating so much of the water that ices up a strawberry ice cream, add buttermilk, and blend it all into a Jeni’s recipe? The expectations were high, people. And then I ate it. Holy. Jeni’s recipes always start out with the smoothest, creamiest, richest base to begin with, thanks to the cornstarch slurry and the bit of cream cheese, and the roasted strawberry syrup blended unbelievably with the buttermilk. It wasn’t quite tart, but balanced and smooth, rich, perfect. The perfect way to showcase ripe strawberries without overwhelming. And so why am I sharing now, now that strawberry season is basically over and we’ve all moved on to pinning caramel apple cupcakes on Pinterest? Because it’s not quite fall, and you can still totally make this as a celebration of the season’s last berries before we are forced into oranges for six months. You’ll thank me–and then curse me in a few weeks when berries are once again something like $6 a pint. Ain’t no time like the present, people. And if you could send me a batch, that’d be stellar. Reminiscing about my strawberry-creamy-stuff cravings week has reignited a desperate need for a pint of this roasted strawberry buttermilk ice cream but I am way, way too tired to make any and our freezer is way, way too packed to fit the ice cream bowl in anyway. What’s a girl to do?! Oh yes.. bribe her readers. Make this. The only thing I changed was to double the amount of strawberry purée in the ice cream base–I think this really emphasizes the berry flavor in a necessary way.
