Fresh Peach Buttermilk Ice Cream

My California Cooking Adventure continued in Livermore, home of Dad and Sharmyn and a whole lot of delicious seasonal produce. I decided that July could be closed out with some ice cream, after all those salads. One problem with this plan, however, was that Dad and Sharmyn only had an old-fashioned hand-cranked ice cream maker, and I am rather a lazy ice cream maker.

Fortunately, that problem was solved in that Sharmyn and Dad do not object to doing some hand cranking. So I bought some buttermilk (why can you only buy half-gallons of buttermilk here??) and rock salt and got busy. First up: (barely) cook some peaches (here I used white nectarines) with a bit of sugar and lemon. That gets puréed and refrigerated for later.

Then you make a brown-sugar custard and add some buttermilk. And then, if you're me, you allow your daughter to convince you a half-recipe will not be enough (it would have been...), so you go through the whole darned process once again. Refrigerate.

Hours later, you dig out the old-fashioned ice cream maker and hand it to professional crankers to freeze the custard. A half-hour or so later, you swirl in the peach purée and get ready to enjoy the tart peachy creaminess.

I liked this a lot, but I believe the peach flavor could be more dominant. I think this is because I didn't have enough peaches for a full recipe, and they were the more mildly-flavored white nectarines. So the brown sugar and buttermilk flavors came through more strongly, though I don't see that as a bad thing, necessarily. To me it tasted like frozen yogurt. If you make this, I would use plenty of yellow peaches, preferably on the almost-shrivelled side. You won't regret it. 

In fact, Dad and Sharmyn so enjoyed their homemade ice cream that they bought an ice-cream insert for the Kitchenaid and have been cranking out quarts and quarts of delicious stuff.