There is just something about home-made strawberry ice cream: it’s the taste of blue skies, of sun on your shoulders; an idealised memory of summer in perfect culinary form. If you’re up to it, and I don’t mean by that anything much, as it’s really pretty simple, make some vanilla shortbread to go with, but whatever, just make this: even using long-haul imported strawberries in bleakest February, it is sunshine-giving, life-transforming, sensational. (But first, do read the section on general ice cream tips.)
500g strawberries
175g caster sugar, plus 2 tablespoons
500ml full-fat milk
500ml double cream
1 vanilla pod
10 egg yolks
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Hull and roughly chop the strawberries, put them into a bowl and sprinkle over the 2 tablespoons of caster sugar and leave them to steep and infuse with flavour.
Pour the milk and cream into a heavy-based saucepan, and add the vanilla pod, split down the middle lengthways. Bring the pan nearly to the boil and then take it off the heat and leave to infuse for 20 minutes.
In a large bowl whisk the egg yolks and the 175g sugar until thick and pale yellow. Take the vanilla pod out of the milk and cream and pour, whisking the while, the warm liquid over the yolks. Put the cleaned-out pan back on the heat with the cream, milk, egg and sugar mixture and stir the custard until it thickens, then take it off the heat and pour it into a bowl to cool.
Purée the strawberries in a processor, and when the custard is cool fold in the lemon juice and strawberry purée.
At this point you can either freeze the ice cream in an ice-cream maker, or in a plastic tub in the freezer. If you do the latter you should remove it from the freezer after an hour and process it again, then put it back into the container for another hour before repeating the process, as usual.
Serves 10–12.