Burned Peach Ice Cream

Peaches have shown up in our breakfast (smoothies), dinner (salads), snacks and desserts all week long. With the last few yellow peaches from Sunday’s market haul, I made a peach ice cream as part of an office frozen dessert event.

One thing in Alton Brown’s recipe that wasn’t in my pantry was peach preserves. Finding this ingredient was not easy: supermarket shelves stocked many brands of apricot jam, but no peach ones. I found several peach spreads mixed with other fruit. In the end, I reluctantly bought a jar of golden peach spread (St. Dalfour). I would have greatly preferred to buy an Ontario product, but I didn’t want to visit half a dozen stores to get one.

When the ice cream base reached 170°F, I noticed it had thickened considerably, and had a curdled appearance. I’m not sure why that happened, as there’s no eggs, just dairy, sugar, salt, vanilla and peach spread. I skipped straining the mixture, as I wanted to keep the bits of peach in the final product.

Next, I halved the peaches, placed them on a baking sheet, and broiled them in the oven. The fruit was juicy, so it took a while for the liquid to evaporate before it started to blacken. I rotated the fruit a few times to get black spots all over. Removing the skin meant losing the burnt bits, but I opted to do it anyway.

With four large peaches diced into this ice cream, there was plenty of fruit in every delicious spoonful. My colleagues really liked it, as did I. Next time, I would try grilling the peaches to get more of a burnt and smoky flavour.