Cherry Vanilla Ice Cream and the Ingenious Cherry Pitter

Last month, the cherries were alluring and abundant at the farmer’s market. While I like eating them fresh, the heat wave this summer and a childhood memory inspired the idea of making cherry vanilla ice cream, a favorite flavor of my mother’s. Preferring the “weird” choices, like rum raison, pralines and cream and cherry vanilla, worked in her favor with young kids. There was always ice cream left for her to eat. Maybe now that I am adult, I could appreciate the subtlety of cherry vanilla ice cream. Besides, I was planning a summer solstice locavore party and it seemed like an appropriate menu item since most of the ingredients could be sourced locally.

The first challenge was finding an ice cream maker. Growing up, I remember the crank kind in the big wood barrel that you would fill with salt and ice. It took a long time and was a lot of work, but my siblings and I never seemed to mind with the reward of fresh ice cream at the end. We usually made ice cream using the fruit that we picked that day. I was looking for the less labor-intensive machine – the electric style one. Back in Berkeley, I borrowed one from a friend on several occasions. It was fraught with its own inconsistencies, ie my friend told me that I have to run it inside the freezer to keep the filling cold enough, but it made better ice cream than any store bought I’d eaten. My mother indicated that she had one, but she’d never used it. I brought it home only to find out that the machine wouldn’t turn on, so that went to the appliance recycling yard. My mother bought a replacement, this time a 2 quart capacity Cuisinart machine that was on sale at William Sonoma. I made sure, first thing this time, that the machine worked. I didn’t want to end up with a bunch of ingredients and no working machine on the day of the party.

The next step was tracking down a cherry pitter. Several years ago, a friend was in Wisconsin on work related trip. She returned to work with several pounds of sour cherries and a story about an awesome cherry pitter she bought. I asked to borrow it for this effort. From past experience, I know that most cherry pitters are challenging to work with; it’s tiring on the hand or the cherries are too big or the pit doesn’t come all the way out. This particular pitter works like a hole punch. It comes with a plunger that is attached to a mason jar lid (you provide your own jar, which keeps down shipping costs). The cherry is placed between the plunger and whole in the lid and then you push down on the plunger and without much effort at all you have a perfectly pitted cherry, often with the stem still intact. Amazing. One could easily pit pounds of cherries without tiring. It’s worth the investment. A similar one can be found at Amazon.

Not having made cherry vanilla ice cream before, I needed to find a recipe. Searching on the internet, I was surprised at how many obviously bad recipes I was finding – why would you make cherry ice cream with maraschino cherries or cherry juice??? I found a simple cherry recipe on at 101 Cookbooks*. It calls for whole milk and heavy cream, but what I liked most was that it uses honey – which meant I could sweeten the ice cream with a local, raw honey. The only ingredient it didn’t include was vanilla, so I found a vanilla ice cream recipe* by Alton Brown that uses whole vanilla bean and substituted this in place of the liquor from the first recipe. My mother swears by making a custard with eggs for ice cream recipes. Neither of these two recipes included eggs and I was trying to keep it simple, so I opted out on the eggs. I did discover that the difference between vanilla ice cream and French vanilla is that the latter uses eggs. I was able to order whole milk and double cream from local farms through Mugshots. Differing cream types (light cream, heavy cream, double cream), identify the amount of fat content. Double cream contains a minimum of 48% milk fat.

While the recipe was really simple, I was met with disaster the first go around. Having worked with finicky ice cream machines before, I was worried about this. The recipe is really simple and requires only that you heat the milk(1 cup), cream(2 cups) and honey (3/8c) until it starts to simmer. Then you add in the pitted and quartered cherries (1 lb) and the vanilla bean(scrapings from one bean and the empty pod), chill the liquid in the fridge for at least a couple of hours and then pour it into the pre-frozen container in the machine. It should only take 20 minutes to turn into a frozen, thickened consistency. Well, it never did thicken and we had cherry milkshakes instead of ice cream. I think most people didn’t mind, but I was disappointed.

Determined to figure out what went wrong, I did some research. A friend thought it might not be a highly rated machine, so I went to the reviews online to find out that it was one of the best. The reviews were helpful though as a few people had a similar experience as I did with others proffering advice. The biggest take away was that I could figure out was that the custard was not chilled enough in advance. Some suggested chilling in the freezer rather than the refrigerator. The one thing I don’t understand about the ice cream maker design is why it has a big opening in the top that is not sealable if it is so important for the liquid to be extremely cold. It just seems like a big hole for the heat to rush into, particularly in the warm months when most ice cream is made and consumed. All machines I saw had this feature, so there must be a reason but I haven’t figured it out.

With the extra remaining ingredients and more fresh cherries, I gave it a second try. This time I put the custard in the freezer for a couple of hours to chill. I also set the cold bowl over the hole to seal it up after pouring in the ingredients. Previously I increased the recipe amount by 1.5 times as I was making some for a large group and the machine claims it would make up to 2 quarts. This time I decided to do the recipe amount of 1 quart. The purpose of the ice cream maker is to whip air into the mixture, so having room for increased volume is important. This is the difference between American ice cream and gelato, which is much denser and requires a different machine. Well these 3 changes did the trick and in less than 20 minutes of machine turning I had perfect cherry vanilla ice cream that I enjoyed with friends. Given this success, I am sure I will be inspired to make more ice cream this summer so I have borrowed my mother’s machine for a little while longer.

*Notes: I made a few changes from the original recipes which are reflected in the ingredients above. One is cooking the vanilla pod along with the scrapings in the liquid for a more intense vanilla flavor. Pull the empty pod out before chilling. Another is increasing the honey quantity by 1.5 times. The honey which is more mellow than regular cane sugar, keeps the dessert from becoming cloyingly sweet, even with this little extra. I also upped the quantity of cherries to one pound.