Scott wrote:
> Made some just the other night, by adding pitted and quartered fresh
> cherries to vanilla ice cream as it was chilling in the ice cream maker.
>
> Very nice taste and texture overall, but the pieces of cherry themselves
> had a somewhat jarring texture due to the crystallization of the water
> therein after it froze. They weren't frozen solid, but the texture
> was... icy.
>
> I'm trying to think of ways to reduce this effect, and came up with two,
> each with positives and negatives:
>
> 1) soak the cherry quarters in a sugar solution, the high sugar
> concentration hopefully working as an antifreeze. The negative here is
> that I'd rather not have the cherries be that sweet--the ice cream I'm
> making is a less-sweet variety, and I'd like to stay with that theme.
>
> 2) drying the cherries, so that there isn't that much water to freeze.
> The problem here is that, as the fresh cherry quarters churned with the
> vanilla ice cream, their juice was added to the ice cream, giving it a
> nice color and adding the cherry flavor. Unless I separately add cherry
> juice to the ice cream, I'll lose that. Also, I wonder if, coupled with
> the cold, if the dried cherry pieces will be leathery.
>
>
> Any thoughts? Other ideas?
>


Try using glycerin (or Kirsch or Amaretto) to embalm the cherries
instead of sugar syrup.

Or put less sugar in your vanilla ice cream base and add glacé or
maraschino cherries instead of fresh.

Bob