Blueberry Ice Cream at Julie’s Birthday Party

Blueberries are a regular theme on Triple Motion. This is the story of our latest blueberry experiment.

When Julie’s 30th birthday-party was approaching, we were trying to decide what kind of ice cream to make. We ventured out to the shops.

PETER: These locally-grown blueberries are great. These aren’t the native blaeberries, but they’re still tasty and I have been adding them to my daily-pancakes more days than not in the past month or so.

BIG D: Julie did write a song about picking blueberries while she was in Tennesee.

PETER: Decision made!

We scooped a stack of punnets of fresh Scottish Blueberries.

Our Blueberry Ice Cream Recipe

• 827 grams Blueberries (from Fife), making a total or 2 1/3 cups of juice after being liquidized and strained
• 1 cup of caster sugar (less 1 tablespoon)
• 1 1/2 eggs
• 2 cups of double cream
• Milk to top up to 1.6L

Most of the colour of blueberries seems to be in the skins so we decided liquidize the berries to release the pigments.

The resulting juice had a slightly green taste which wasn’t quite the distinctive blueberry flavour I was used to. Most of my experiences of eating blueberries have been in muffins or jam so I gently heated the juice for a few minutes which seemed to improve the flavour and definitely helped to release the colour from the skins.

At this point Peter and I had a little argument about how to sieve the juice. Peter was keen to use muslin as we had done with the blaeberry sorbet, however I was quite keen on using tights (as a homage to Celine’s tights used once for raspberry sorbet).

There are several reasons I like tights:

• Because they’re synthetic there’s not much risk of them absorbing much of the precious liquid you’re straining.
• They’re also less likely to absorb the pigment, which gives some of the flavour.
• Playing with a big wobbly blob of fruit juice contained within a a piece of underwear tickles my purile sense of humour.

The main problem with the tights we bought was that they stank of some wierd menthol/antiseptic perfume which I guess is to counteract body/foot odour. It took some considerable time, hot water and detergent to wash it out.

Meanwhile Peter continued to dangle the increasingly tempting muslin cloth in front of me. I ignored his smugness and carried on with my stockings.

Although it was good, the final mix wasn’t as intensely blueberry flavoured as I had hoped. We got Julie to blind-taste it before we cranked up and her first guess was mango!  Having said that I would definitely make it again, maybe with even more blueberries and slightly less cream, or even blueberry and yoghurt to give the contrast between sweet blueberries and soured milk. Actually now I come to think of it maybe blackcurrant would make better icecream than blueberry?