Fresh Peach Gelato
Last year my husband and the kids got me a little peach tree for Mother’s Day. This year, much to everyone’s surprise, it produced its first crop of peaches! How a tree not much bigger than me could produce 24 little peaches I don’t know, but we were grateful, and the peaches are delicious. My daughter has been mowing through them at a prodigious rate, so I decided to snatch a few up and make Peach Gelato before they were all gone.
We have a hand-crank ice cream maker with an inner sleeve that lives in our downstairs freezer in case we have a sudden need to make ice cream. (Better safe than sorry.) This time was not a last-minute culinary sprint, however, but a calculated experiment. I recently read in the New York Times that adding a little bit of alcohol to the cream before freezing causes the ice cream to stay scoopable the next day, instead of going all rock hard and having to be thawed extensively before eating.
I have always made Philadelphia-style ice cream, which means not cooking the custard before freezing it, but this time I wanted to make an authentic gelato, so I began with the instructions in Giuliano Bugialli’s 1982 book Classic Techniques of Italian Cooking. Bugialli was big on public TV back in the days before cooking shows were everywhere. The great thing about his method in this case is that he makes a little custard in the double boiler, but he doesn’t cook the fruit in it. That gets blended instead with the cold milk and cream mixture. I personally think that there are very few ways of cooking a peach that result in a better product than a fresh peach, so I try to use them raw whenever possible.
I froze the gelato in two batches—first the half without the cognac and then the second half with 1 teaspoon of cognac, to see if it really made a difference in the texture the next day. And because cognac and peaches should be good together, right? What I found was that both batches produced delicious gelato, and you couldn’t really taste the cognac in the second batch. Which may explain why on the second day, they were both rock solid. Oh well. Next time I will add more—maybe a tablespoon?—and for now I will just take my gelato out of the freezer before dinner so I can eat it afterwards.
Keeping the peaches raw really worked. When you eat a spoonful of this gelato, you get the distinct impression that the peaches are being lifted to heaven on a creamy, custardy little cloud, singing a hymn about beauty and deliciousness and summer. So that worked out.
