Introduction

Ice cream was not so hot when I was growing up. It was usually limited to the summertime treat of a 9 pence orange Sparkle (a fluorescent ice pop) in the park after school, or the occasional slice of a supermarket’s economy sticky yellow vanilla brick (a rectangular length of ice cream wrapped in cardboard). This would melt and refreeze over the course of being served from its damp box, and turn into a curious foamy gum. But I still loved it.

As a teenager living at home in suburban Twickenham my favorite cookbook was Cuisine of the Sun by Roger Vergé, an inheritance from my godmother (and one half of the Two Fat Ladies), Jennifer Patterson. The recipes in it demonstrate the use of simple harmonies to enhance the flavor of each ingredient, while still allowing the beautiful, natural produce of Provence to shine. Vergé called it “cuisine heureuse.” It left me pining for something brighter than the supermarket foods I’d grown up with…something transportive and sun-kissed.

It was a relief to leave school, which I hated and had only a string of failed A levels to show for. I went to art school and, to pay the bills, got a job at age 18 working as a greengrocer on the forecourt of the Bluebird Garage on the King’s Road. I spent a lot of time spraying arugula with an atomizer, while the real work was done by Alf. He arrived early from the market in Milan with a van full of beautiful fruits and vegetables, from moonlight-yellow pears wrapped in inky, indigo sugar paper to bunches of dusky black grapes tied with shiny lilac florist ribbon.

I dropped out of art school and spent the summer of 2000 in Marseille instead. On my return to London I read a newspaper article about a man called Lionel Poilâne who was opening a bakery in London to make this stuff called sourdough bread. I got the bus straight over to the Pimlico shop to find the doors wide open and the shop still being built, with Monsieur Poilâne overseeing the installation of a vast brick oven. I was emboldened after my summer speaking French and introduced myself to him, winning myself the position of Poilâne’s first (and—for some years—only) British shop girl.

Paris

It was a hard sell at the beginning, with the bread at an eye-watering £5.90 per loaf. People would come in asking if we made sandwiches or sausage rolls or pies, and we had to try and encourage them to taste the bread: the miraculous flavor of its crackling crust a result of the magic that can be achieved from just a few essential ingredients: flour, water, and salt. I worked as an assistant at the London shop and spent some time at the Paris branch. In Paris I lived in a room above the bakery itself, and the smell of those huge burnished loaves of sourdough bread baking in the ancient brick ovens got me out of bed to work at 5:30 every morning. But although I loved that company, and the chewy crust of that bread, I was looking for something else.

Each morning during the spring of 2001 as I got ready for work I had the telly on in the background. It was screening live segments from the Cannes Film Festival. A clip showed pop stars singing on the beach and their hair looked really shiny. It seemed glamorous and appealing. Then I remembered that Roger Vergé, author of my favorite cookbook, had a restaurant and cooking school in Cannes.

Poilâne was friends with Vergé and when I handed in my notice and bought a one-way ticket to Nice, he handed me a personal letter of recommendation to give to him. He asked Vergé to take care of me and wrote that I sold bread “as though I were selling diamonds.” I still have that letter in a suitcase, because pathetically I was too shy to give it to Mr. Vergé. I didn’t have the confidence to work in a real kitchen. But I couldn’t face going home, and so instead I took a waitressing job at a beachfront hotel, and started a new career as Cannes’ worst waitress.

Cannes

It was incredibly unglamorous. I worked 16-hour shifts in tennis shoes, nude tights, and a pleated aertex miniskirt. But that was when I found an ice cream shop—a little glacière with tinted glass windows and green leather banquettes just off the Croissette—and began a daily ritual. After a swim in the sea and before work, I would eat ice cream sundaes for breakfast.

The menu board changed daily and the flavors dazzled me: cerise, abricot, cassis, groseille, saffran, and calisson. It was nothing like ice cream in the UK. I was astonished by the texture and how they captured the fresh taste of an ingredient in a frozen scoop. I puzzled over how it was made, and the ice cream seed was planted.

On my days off I took the train along the coast to Italy. Ice cream specialities in Piedmonte were hazelnut, coffee, and latte Alpina—even violet Pinguino’s (choc ices)—and in Liguria, green lemon and bergamot. People seemed to go for an ice cream and a walk the way we in the UK go to the pub. I walked and walked, discovering markets and eating ice creams.

Back home that winter, working another stopgap deli job, I read The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten. My favorite chapter was “The Mother of All Ice Cream,” about his search for the best gelato in the world. I had a plan. Summoning the help of all the Italians working in my deli, I wrote letters to every place mentioned in the book. I attached my CV and asked to be given a chance to apprentice and learn the art of making ice cream. I posted the applications and waited patiently. I didn’t get a single reply.

New York

There was nowhere in the UK in which you could learn ice cream making back then. But in 2002, I inherited a generous sum of money from my grandmother. After sitting on it for some time, I decided to enroll in a proper chef diploma course…in New York. I feebly hoped that afterward I might be able to get work experience for Jeffrey Steingarten.

What I didn’t expect was what happened at culinary school; I loved every second of it, and for the first time in my life I started doing well at something. My head teacher—Chef Ted—said he’d pay thirty bucks at Daniel’s to eat my coconut ice cream. I still remember the feeling of my skin stinging as it flushed pink with happiness.

The creativity and energy of what I experienced food-wise in New York wasn’t tied to the old European traditions we still hang on to in Britain. There was such positivity and invention! I snipped an article out of the New York Times listing the city’s best ice creams, from pumpkin at Ciao Bella to lychee and red bean at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory; when my course finished I went to “stage” (work for free) at my favorite of them all: Otto Enoteca, a pizza and gelato joint that was already famous for its olive oil gelato with sea salt and strawberries. This was really something. The head pastry chef at Otto was a curly-haired, bandanna-wearing, old school New Yorker called Meredith Kurtzman. She had a sensitivity for putting flavors together that was original but never sensationalist, and was scrupulous about the pure taste of the ingredients shining through. I was happiest when I was sent to Union Square Greenmarket on Monday and Wednesday mornings to buy ingredients. My heart was bursting with pride to be walking the streets of New York in my clean chef’s whites, and to feel part of that city. It was late autumn and I would come back to the restaurant with crates of pecan nuts, pumpkin, fresh corn, and Concord grapes and tins of Grade 3 maple syrup, all to be spun into delicious ice creams.

New York was still swelteringly hot, and at the end of the day I’d fill a container with house-made granita in tart berry flavors. The bar would top it up with soda water and a straw, and, sipping it slowly, I’d make my way home to the tiny East Village studio I shared with a small mouse and a quite large cockroach.

I would have stayed if I could, but my visa was about to end. So I spent my remaining few free days doing stages. One was at Prune. Gabrielle Hamilton was another dazzler. She approved of my apartment having no air-con, and told me not to be afraid of the heat when I was given the task of grilling bream one service; instead, she said I should get closer to the fiery flames. Most important, she told me a new kind of restaurant had opened in London: St. John Bread & Wine. She said I should go back and get a job with Fergus Henderson.

London

It was 11 a.m. and the tables in the dining room at St. John had been pulled together and laid for staff lunch. In the open kitchen trays of fat, pink freshly boiled Scottish langoustines lay steaming by open windows while Justin the baker was setting warm caraway seed and buttery eccles cakes out on the counter.

I was allowed to stage that day, and at the end of it was offered the job of pastry chef. In all I spent five years working for Fergus at St. John Bread & Wine and then for his wife, Margot, at the Rochelle Canteen. It was the greatest happiness I had known up to that point. All us chefs were utterly devoted to Fergus and Justin and worked incredibly hard for them. But what was special about St. John was its humanity. It wasn’t assumed that you had to suffer to create beautiful food. Or contort the ingredients. Dishes were presented simply to highlight the beauty of the ingredient (they were mostly British) and not the ego of the chef. It was unprecedented and brave at a time when most cooking in the UK was looking outward for inspiration. A revelation for me was receiving a tray of Kentish strawberries one day in the first week of June. Small and fragrant and rosy red all the way through like sweeties, they seemed miraculous.

The very first ice cream I made at St. John was fresh mint. I peeped across the kitchen to the dining room, and watched with delight as the lady who had ordered it paused, looked down at her bowl with surprise, and smiled.

Meanwhile, every holiday I had I went to Italy, making my way to each gelateria mentioned in Jeffrey Steingarten’s old essay—on returning to St. John I was able to test out new recipes from what I’d learned.

Sicily, Rome, Naples

Backpacking with my sister in Sicily one summer, I ended up eating tangerine sorbet in Caffé Sicilia in Noto, and asking the waiter questions about how it was made. He told me that years before, they had had a funny letter from an English girl asking about their ice creams. I was taken into the kitchen and there was my old letter pinned to the wall, complete with passport photo. The elderly owner of the café came out to talk to me. He showed me around the kitchen, giving me a piece of marzipan to taste made from almonds from neighboring Avola and a lumpy lemon. He communicated that although he was sympathetic, I could never learn how to make ice cream like an Italian—we couldn’t have the same understanding of ingredients, because he had been making it since he was “cosi!”…and gestured to knee height.

Well, there’s nothing like being told you can’t do something to spur you on. I decided then and there that I wanted to make ice cream with the same skill and understanding that this man had. But, instead of trying to copy what Italians do so well already, I would try to do my own thing—something relevant to the place I came from—and make it perfect.

I left St. John to set up La Grotta Ices and spent a few months cheffing for Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold while I saved up to buy my ice cream van. One morning while I was chopping beets (wrongly, as Margot pointed out, “Argh…No! You gotta still be able to see the SHAPE of the beet!”), Margot mentioned that the night before she had been sitting next to Alice Waters (the pioneering chef-restaurateur and force behind the sustainable food movement in California) at a fund-raising dinner. Alice had recently founded a kitchen at the American Academy in Rome where they hoped to feed the community of the academy using locally grown, seasonal organic produce. They needed volunteers. I sent a postcard to Alice at her restaurant Chez Panisse and waited. Six months later, I was on a night train to Rome, where I lived and worked for a winter, before returning to making ices again in the spring.

Working abroad during the off season became an annual habit. The winter after that I moved to Naples. I pictured myself renting a charming room in a crumbling villa and topping up my winter tan on a balcony cascading with lemons. I’d find a job, shop in the market every day, eat ice cream, and maybe I’d try to write, too.

What I discovered when I got there (apart from the fact that it was freezing cold and rained almost every day for three months) was that this situation doesn’t really exist in Naples. There are no flats to rent for single professionals. Single people live at home with their families until they get married…and then they stay living at home some more. Instead, I took a long-term lease on a room in a B&B. Living with a depressed (he ate a LOT of Nutella) 19-year-old boy and his pet chinchilla was not what I’d had in mind, but never mind—I pounded the streets of Naples for hours each day, eating pizza fritta and sfogliatelle, and tried to look for work.

In Naples I worked at two restaurants. A chef friend in London had tipped me off about somewhere he’d had a good meal, so I went there first. The two women running the kitchen looked at me with deep suspicion and asked what the hell I thought I was doing. Didn’t I know there was a crisis in Italy? There wasn’t enough work for Italians, let alone foreigners. Plus I towered over both of them and was too big for the kitchen. Nevertheless, I could come a few evenings a week and do work experience if I wanted to learn. It was pretty terrifying. Rita and Nuncia used to fight with each other like wildcats—occasionally breaking off to complain that I was rolling the rice balls too slowly—and would then attack one another again and have to be dragged apart by the always-amused head waiter. Sometimes I’d catch Rita looking me slowly up and down…“L’altezza è mezza bellezza” (half of beauty is height), she would mutter bitterly before turning away with a sigh.

I managed to get another day job, but the only place that would take me was a trendy modern restaurant where the owner was a bit of a celebrity and the food sucked—the pasta was gluey, and the fish was vacuum packed and sous-vided to obliteration.

Nevertheless, Naples was good. Piaggio Ape’s served as impromptu market stalls all over town, piled high with artichokes that I gorged on—3 euros for a bunch of ten. Coffee everywhere was dementedly good and thick, as only the first oil-rich drips made it into your drink—the scalding hot cup was whisked away leaving the rest of the coffee to pour away into the drain. I would picture the underground pipes of Naples flowing with espresso.

La Grotta Ices

Now I am the happy owner of La Grotta Ices, finally established in 2008. The name comes from the Italian for “cave” or “grotto,” and it was named as such in homage to the first cool, dark ice cream shop that I discovered working in Cannes, and which set me off on my journey.

At first the ice creams were made at home, with two freezers in a bedroom, then under a damp brick railway arch in Bermondsey. Since 2009, they have been created in my workshop or “ice cream shed,” a converted Victorian greengrocer in a beautiful historical south London square.

The La Grotta Ices range changes weekly. My intent is to create inventive, not-too-sweet ice creams that capture the bright flavor of exquisite, ripe fruit but with a supernaturally light, smooth, and sublime texture. The focus is on using minimally processed, fresh, whole ingredients and using the confines of the seasons and simple methods to do so. Ices are sold from the back of a small white Piaggio Ape—the same vehicle used to sell fruits and vegetables in Neapolitan markets.

La Grotta runs from April to December. I sell scoops at markets and art fairs, and tubs in shops around London, and in between that teach a long-established class in ice cream making at the award-winning School of Artisan Foods in Nottinghamshire. For the first three months of the year—when it’s too cold to sell ice cream (it doesn’t melt in the mouth properly at temperatures below 57°F)—I continue to work abroad.

What’s the Difference Between Ice Cream and Gelato?

It is a question that tormented me for many years. And that many people ask me. The literal answer is that gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream…but here’s what most people will also explain:

1. Gelato is made with mostly milk and rarely contains egg yolks (ice cream is generally custard-based). Gelato is consequently lower in fat.

2. Gelato is churned more slowly than ice cream, which means it incorporates less air into the mix and is a denser, smoother product compared to ice cream. Less air means that the flavor of the gelato is more concentrated.

3. Gelato is served at a higher temperature than ice cream so that it has a soft texture and can be scooped easily.

What you will never hear anyone (particularly gelato makers) explain is just how they create all of these wonderful attributes. It’s as though it happened by magic!

In most cases, gelato compensates for the lower fat and less air by adding commercially used ingredients less familiar to the home cook. Dry milk powder (milk solids) adds richness and body to the gelato, making the texture seem creamier and more dense. This is because although it is fat-free, it is high in milk proteins. Sugars like glucose, dextrose, and trimoline allow the gelato to stay soft and scoopable as though freshly churned, but because they don’t have the sweetness of saccharose (sugar), the gelato doesn’t taste as sweet. They also help prevent crystallization, which keeps the gelato smooth.

I choose not to use either in my ice creams for a few reasons. First, dry milk powder has a “cooked” taste that interrupts the sweet, pure flavor of fresh cream and milk. Likewise, glucose, dextrose, and trimoline tend to coat your tongue. Sugar is much “cleaner” tasting and allows the other flavors to shine. But there are other issues to consider apart from taste. Dry milk powder contains roughly 50 percent lactose compared with fresh whole milk, which is 4.8 percent. Skimmed milk powder is a prevalent ingredient in many processed foods, and as people are consuming lactose in much higher quantities than we used to, it wouldn’t be surprising to me if this turned out to be one of the causes of lactose intolerance.

The perfect balance

You don’t have to use mysterious powders to make great ice cream. The foundations of a perfect scoop are based on having the right quantity of water, sugar, fat, solids (proteins), and emulsifier in a recipe, all of which are found in milk, cream, and fresh eggs. Whole fruits add body. These ingredients need to be frozen quickly while being stirred/churned. This incorporates some air (to keep the ice cream light) and ensures the ice crystals are as small and even as possible (to keep the ice cream smooth).

Ice cream recipes have to be perfectly balanced to work. If you remove one element—like the fat—for example, your ice cream will suffer and lose “body,” becoming thin and watery. Likewise, if you take away the sugar, your recipe will freeze into a hard icy block and be impossible to scoop. A well-balanced recipe will stand you in good stead.

How to Use This Book

I now have 13 years’ worth of crispy-edged, custard-splattered recipe notebooks (and counting) in which I’ve recorded all my ice cream making attempts. The early books are experimental—recipes I tried once or twice and didn’t go back to. Throughout the middle ones you start to recognize the favorites that I return to, making small changes and adjustments with each more recent version. This book contains all the recipes that made it into the most recent notebook—the core favorites. They have been honed and edited to leave only those that work and are delicious, ones that I look forward to returning to year after year.

The order in which the recipes have been printed follows the spectrum of ices make throughout the year. The “menu” is constantly changing as ingredients come in and go out of season. You can dip in and out of the book as you like, but if you use it as a seasonal guide you will find fruits that are more likely to be ripe, which means they taste good and are at their best value.

The book begins in January, mid-winter, a dry time for locally grown produce and a time when I welcome piercingly bright citrus fruits into my kitchen. Amalfilemons, leafy navel oranges, and bergamot from Italy come into season now, followed by sweet and sour kumquats and the extraordinary blood orange with its pitted peel heavy with rich oils and its volcanic strawberry-flavored tangy flesh—it’s exciting! In February, I give in to the lure of dazzling tropical fruits from overseas. The vivid colors and potent flavors of pineapple, passion fruit, papaya, lime, and mango bring energy to this somewhat bleak time of year.

Early spring ice creams employ the use of bracing kiwi, earthy rhubarb, confetti-like rice, peach leaves, and delicate scented blossoms like mimosa and clover. In late May, expect the first cherries from the South of France and the Gariguette strawberry from Brittany. British strawberries should be ripe and red all the way through by June and are swiftly followed by soft-skinned stone fruits: flat white peaches, apricots, and nectarines.

By mid-summer my ice cream scooping freezer displays a gorgeous selection of pinks, reds, and purples: custards and water ices stained from juicy berries, blackcurrants, and pêche de vigne.

Autumn is a rich time for grapes, figs, melons, and plums. Then later on, apple, pear, and quince make fragrant ice creams—perfect for serving alongside a slice of fruit pie as the temperature drops and the air becomes fresher. Fresh fruits are less available come November and so I turn to richer flavorings to use in ice creams—chestnuts, almonds, pine nuts, pistachio, malt, dried fruits, and warm butterscotch. To celebrate the year coming to a close the recipes become more festive—ricotta with candied fruit peel, Barbadian rum custard, and also clementine and spiced lime sorbets.

My recipes are less sweet and have a slightly lower fat content compared to “super premium” ice cream. The reason for this is that I like the flavors to be bright and not too inhibited by heavy cream and sugar. In my opinion, they are the perfect balance of fresh fruit, milk, cream, and sugar—rich and satisfying, with a good body and “mouthfeel.” This does mean, though, that it’s a good idea to place the ice cream in the fridge for 10 minutes before serving, to make it more scoop-able. If you prefer a richer-tasting ice cream, you can swap the amount of milk for half-and-half in each recipe to no detriment.

Ingredients

One thing about not using the more commercially used ice cream ingredients at La Grotta Ices (such as dry milk powder/glucose/dextrose) is that the home cook can make exactly the same recipes that I make. Recipes have been scaled down to domestic size and can be replicated at home with the same success. Teaching my regular ice cream making classes at the School of Artisan Food over the past seven years gives me a chance to test them out!

If you feel the same way about minimally processed ingredients, you can start by choosing good dairy, like organic heavy cream and milk from trustworthy sources that support the dairy industry. Buy good eggs, free-range at least, please, because factory farming is gross. Large ones work best for these recipes. I like using Turbinado sugar (you only need superfine sugar for cake-making, though you can use it if you prefer) as it lends a delicious rounded depth to the ice cream and is unrefined. Unless otherwise stated, all the recipes in this book use unrefined granulated.

In an ideal world you might use fruit you’ve either grown or picked yourself. Failing that, I recommend shopping at farmers’ markets or ethnic markets (where the produce is often cheap and ripe), or buying from independent shops who care about sourcing the good stuff. Picking your own from fruit farms gives you an opportunity to find harder-to-source ingredients like blackcurrant and peach leaves. Ask first but it’s really unlikely anybody would miss a few leaves. Give fruit a good sniff before buying it and choose that with the best perfume. Fruits will always taste best and be sweetest when they’re in season and this is important when using them for ice cream, as you want the flavor to be strong and bright.

Some ingredients might be difficult to come by—like mulberries. But the point isn’t that this is something you can have whenever you want…it’s a treat to make perhaps just once a year when you find that special cache—and remember it for the rest of the year.

If a recipe doesn’t require using an entire fruit (say you’ve bought a really big pineapple) then use the part from the flower end first. Most fruits (except berries, which are uniformly sweet) have a flower end where the blossom used to grow, and a stem end where the fruit attached to a branch. The flower end is always the sweetest part and will make your ice cream or sorbet taste as good as it can. Test this out the next time you eat an apple!

Unless you live in a place where you get gluts of ripe fruit, good ingredients are expensive, so be economical wherever possible to maximize their use. Unwaxed citrus peels can be used for candying; lemon and clementine leaves can be steeped in sugar syrup and used to add an extra dimension to sorbet and granita. After sieving berries you can use the seeds to make “pip juice.” Just mix them in a jug with cold water and chill in the fridge overnight before straining the next day and—ta-daa!—a gem-colored free fruit squash! Likewise, if you are able to pick your own fruits, infusing ice cream bases with peach, fig, or blackcurrant leaves or fresh herbs makes a simple ice into something unique and extraordinary and impossible to replicate in a shop-bought product. Ice cream is a great carrier of flavor, so have fun experimenting—just Google to check whether it’s safe to eat first! (I once had to pour gallons of precious lily-of-the-valley-flavored ice cream down the drain after I discovered I’d infused the custard with poison.)

Vanilla pods also are such an extraordinary ingredient—derived from an orchid—and expensive, too. It’s crazy not to get the most use out of them possible. Split pods lengthwise to scrape the seeds out, then add both pod and seeds to the milk as it’s heating. Once the custard is aged, scoop out the pod, rinse in cold water, and leave to dry for a day. The pods can then be kept in a sugar jar for a few weeks to flavor your baking sugar. I hear you yawning…but at this point, you can advance vanilla thriftiness to another level: remove the brittle sugary pods and poke them into a three-quarters-full bottle of cheap vodka—the cheapest you like. Every time you use a vanilla pod, add it to the bottle until you can’t squeeze any more in. At this point, write the date on the bottle and hide it somewhere for six months. When you look at it again it will have become a half-gallon of viscous black vanilla extract. Not for vodka shots, but perfect for any recipe that calls for vanilla extract and at a fraction of the cost of the shop-bought stuff.

Methods

Wash fruits (unless specified not to) in a sink full of clean, cold water then place on clean dish towels to dry.

In ice cream recipes where the fruits are to be used fresh and raw, I almost always recommend macerating them in a mixture of sugar and lemon juice. This draws color and flavor from their skins and intensifies their flavor. Cooked fruit also intensifies in color after some resting time in the fridge. Both parts of the recipe, the fruit and custard, should be the same cold temperature when they are mixed together before churning. This helps to preserve the bright color of the ice cream and avoids the possibility of the custard splitting, which can easily happen otherwise because of the fruit’s natural acidity.

When making sugar syrups, there is no need to weigh out your sugar and water separately. Remember that cups and ounces are interchangeable when it comes to water—so just weigh your sugar, then add the water to the same bowl or pan until it reaches the desired weight.

Tempering refers to mixing the uncooked egg yolks and sugar together, before slowly adding the hot milk and cream in a way that avoids scrambling the eggs. To do this, mix the yolks and sugar together with a whisk, and then pour most of the hot dairy liquid over them in a slow stream, whisking constantly. Leave a little milk at the bottom of the pan each time to prevent the base of the pan from scorching. Whisk well to dissolve the sugar and any lumps of yolk, then pour the mix back into the same pan and cook out over low heat to 82°C/180°F, stirring constantly to make the custard.

Take care not to mix the sugar and yolks together too early on; only do this once the milk and cream are hot and steamy. Sugar (and salt) both have the effect of setting the proteins in the egg yolks and will make hard yellow lumps in your custard if they sit together for too long first.

The ice cream base (or custard) should be cooked to 82°C/180°F in every recipe where dairy or egg yolks are used. This is called pasteurization and the reasons behind it are twofold: first, the custard base only thickens at 80°C/176°F (this is the stage when most recipe books refer to the custard as being able to “coat the back of a spoon”) and this makes your base much silkier and richer in texture compared to an uncooked one. Second, it ensures that if there happen to be harmful bacteria in the dairy or eggs—unlikely nowadays, but still possible—they will be killed off at this temperature. There’s no point trying to guess this stage when digital thermometers are inexpensive and provide a quick, efficient way of monitoring the temperature. The custard should be stirred constantly as it heats up, otherwise the mixture may scorch or overcook in the corners of the pan, scrambling the eggs. Use a heatproof silicone spatula to do this so that it gets into the corners, or a heart-spring whisk rather than an old wooden spoon (which have a tendency to smell like bolognese sauce—at least mine do). Keep a close eye on the pan and never let the mix boil, as this will also split the custard.

Use a heavy-based, non-reactive pan made from stainless steel to cook your custards, and for when you cook fruit. Other metals like aluminium may react to the acids in the fruit, causing discoloration and a “tinny” flavor. A heavy base means the custard will cook more evenly and is less likely to scorch.

Cooling the custard back down to room temperature so you can get it into the fridge as quickly as possible is just as important as pasteurization to ensure it is safe to eat. The best way to do this is by placing the pan of hot custard in an ice water bath and stirring every few minutes until it cools. This simply means filling a sink or large container with cold water and ice cubes or ice packs. Carefully place the pan upright in the water, making sure that the water level is equal to the level of ice cream base inside—too high and the pan could upturn and too little and it will not cool the mix efficiently. Stir the ice cream base occasionally and once it reaches room temperature, remove from the water bath, cover, and chill in the fridge.

Aging the ice cream base means refrigerating it at 4°C/39°F for at least 4 hours, or preferably overnight. This stage is not absolutely necessary if you are short of time, but I highly recommend it as it produces dramatically better results. Time in the fridge allows the fat molecules to mingle and bond with the water molecules in the recipe. This makes the aged custard mix taste fuller, rounder, and creamier. The ice cream will also hold its shape and have better structure once scooped—making it less “drippy.” In any case, the mix should always be fridge-cold before churning, otherwise your ice cream machine will have to work harder to cool it down and it may not freeze sufficiently. There is no need to age sorbet mixes, but these should be chilled before churning.

I like to add the chilled fruit and custard together then liquidize them really well before sieving the mix, to produce a perfectly smooth fake-looking but really delicious highly aerated soft serve–style result. You can use a stick (or “immersion”) blender to do this, or a Vitamix or NutriBullet works brilliantly if you have one, but otherwise a standard upright blender will do the trick. Pour the blended mix into a fine-mesh sieve or chinois (cone-shaped sieve) then use the back of a small ladle to push it through with a plunging action. It might sound fussy to specify what type of sieve to use, but this tip is a chefs’ favorite and takes seconds. It is much more efficient than standing around trying to push purée through with a spoon or spatula. The sieved mix can then be poured straight into your ice cream machine and churned.

Aside from the granita, which is still frozen in a freezer, the best way of making the recipes in this book—if you don’t have an ice cream machine—is to go out and buy an ice cream machine! They can be bought really cheaply nowadays and will produce a smoother, less icy result than trying to freeze the ice cream yourself.

If you insist on making ice cream without a machine, you can freeze the mixture in a big bowl. After 45 minutes, take it out from the freezer and whisk vigorously. Do this twice, and then consecutively with a big metal spoon or spatula every 30 minutes until uniformly frozen.

In an ice cream machine, churn the mix until it has increased by approximately 20 percent in volume and looks thick and smooth like soft-serve ice cream. If the bowl of the machine has been pre-frozen properly (unless you have a machine with a built-in freezing element) and your mix is cold, this should take about 20 minutes.

The ice cream can be eaten freshly churned—and is extremely good this way, but it will quickly melt! If you are making it to serve later on, then at this point you need to transfer the ice cream quickly into an airtight lidded container. Cover it with a sheet of wax paper (plastic wrap tears when frozen) to avoid exposure to the air before putting the lid on and freezing to harden for at least 4 hours.

Once frozen, recipes will keep well for up to a month, if stored properly, unless stated otherwise. To serve, remove the ice cream from the freezer and place in the fridge for 10 to 15 minutes before scooping. Each recipe makes approximately 1 liter/1 quart, or 10 good scoops.