The taste of summer

Several weeks ago we suddenly found ourselves the possessors of a dozen or so tiny, perfectly ripe peaches. They had fallen off our tiny, two-year-old peach trees, and while they were – did I already say this? – tiny, and almost all pit, not to mention dusty and occasionally bruised from having landed on the ground, they were also (as I know I already touched upon) perfectly ripe and plump and perfumed and mouth-wateringly delicious. The kind of delicious where you have to wipe off your chin afterwards.

What to do with them? They hardly seemed worth the effort to peel. So I didn't peel them. Instead I washed them, then simply twisted them open to remove the pits, smushed them up in my hands to form a rough puree, sprinkled them with lemon juice and sugar and cinnamon and came back in a few hours to make them into peach ice cream.

I had run across a recipe on one of the very few food blogs I visit, and it sounded just right for a sweltering summer day – primarily because this particular version did not require any cooking, or eggs (we happened to be out of eggs).

So here's my version of her recipe. Not everyone will appreciate the texture of the peach skins in there, but to me that's the whole appeal – these are real live peaches, and a rough tickle of fuzz on the tongue is part of the pleasure. In any case, if the skins are tough enough to really bother you, the peach is probably not ripe enough to use in this recipe.

And of course you're welcome to peel them if you want.

Raw peach ice cream, with skins
2 cups cream
1 cup buttermilk (this makes it so good, almost yogurt-like)
2 to 3 cups (crushed) very ripe homegrown peaches, unpeeled
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons lemon juice

1. Macerate & marinate peaches as described above. If you're able to leave them alone for awhile, so much the better. Keep them in the fridge so they're as cold as possible when you start making the ice cream.
2. Pour all the ingredients together and give them a good stir. You can throw in some more sliced or diced peaches here if you want.
3. Freeze in an ice cream maker, or in shallow metal pans in the freezer (stirring it up good every 20 minutes or so until it turns into ice cream).

This was to die for right out of the ice cream maker, though not as rich and creamy as a cooked custard-style ice cream made with eggs. The flavor holds up when you re-freeze it, but it got very hard and strangely brittle, breaking off in chips and chunks when I served it again the next day instead of curling into round perfect balls in the scooper. That gave me the idea that this would make great paletas – I think it would be very unlikely to go all soft and sloopy and run off the stick, or fall on the sidewalk or into your lap or wherever. Next time I make it I'm definitely going to try that.

For those who care – my best estimate is that all the ingredients listed above come to a total of about 209 grams of carbohydrate. Based on the volume of our ice cream maker (1.5 quarts) I'm going to guess it comes up to about 17 grams per half-cup serving. Or maybe less, since all those ingredients made more than we could fit into the ice cream maker and so theoretically the 209 grams should probably be divided by something more like 2 quarts, instead of 1.5.

Maybe next time I'll try making half this amount. With this first batch, in order to make room for the bulk of it to freeze properly we had to remove at least a cup or so before it was completely frozen. Under the circumstances we felt we had no choice but to eat it as it was.