Skip to footer

Homemade artisan ice cream

What screams summer more than ice cream? Absolutely nothing. 'Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream' will have you churning out hip flavors in your own kitchen.

|
Devon Carlson/The Christian Science Monitor
Transform cantaloupe into sorbet for a wonderful in-season dessert.

With flavors such as "Earl Grey" and "Palm Sugar," the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Van Leeuwen ice cream truck is not your run-of-the-mill ice cream stop. Now, you can make their hand-crafted, artisan ice cream flavors at home thanks to their newly released book "Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream" by brothers Ben and Peter Van Leeuwen and business partner Laura O'Neill. Already famous in New York, this book is sure to carry their name around the world with their steadfast commitment to using the best ingredients without additives or preservatives.

With classic flavors such as mint-chocolate chip and strawberry, new takes on old classics (try the spicy Bali chocolate), and completely unique flavors such as the sticky sweet black rice ice cream, there is sure to be a flavor there for every reader. Vegan recipes? They have those, too. But what if – and I have a hard time believing this – you aren’t much of an ice cream person? Have no fear, there are numerous recipes for sorbets and granitas. 

Van Leeuwen and co-authors have thought of everything. In the process of making ice cream bases, it is inevitable that one uses a lot of egg-yolks. So the ice cream team has included a collection of recipes that use lots of egg whites, precluding the need to frantically search Google for “recipes that use a lot of egg whites.”

I decided to branch out of my favorite flavors and try something I’d never tried before: cantaloupe sorbet. With only four ingredients, it seemed like the perfect easy summer recipe. And it was. I just cubed a cantaloupe, added a bit of sugar, lime juice, and lime zest, and blended the ingredients together. Twenty minutes later I was scooping my sorbet base from the ice cream maker. A couple hours in the freezer and I had sorbet the color of summer.

Cheers!

Cantaloupe Sorbet
From "Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream"
Makes about 1 quart 

1 2-lb. cantaloupe
1/2 cup sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon finely grated lime zest
Pinch of kosher salt

1. Place the cantaloupe, sugar, lime juice, lime zest, and salt in a blender and puree until smooth. Transfer the sorbet base to a quart-size container, cover, and refrigerate until fully cold, about 3 hours.

2. Pour the chilled sorbet base into an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Place the container in which you refrigerated the sorbet base in the freezer, so you can use it to store the finished sorbet. Churn the sorbet until it resembles Italian ice.

3. Transfer the sorbet to the chilled storage container and freeze until hardened to your desired consistency. The sorbet will keep, frozen, for up to 7 days.

Recipe reprinted with permission from Ecco.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Homemade artisan ice cream
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Food/Stir-It-Up/2015/0619/Homemade-artisan-ice-cream
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe