Raw Peach Ice Cream

It has been a dry spring here in Missouri. This means that farmers of all kinds are struggling with getting food from their fields to their customers. This doesn’t just apply to our CSA and other produce farmers but our source of Raw Grassfed Milk is also struggling. When the fields don’t get rain the grass isn’t as lush and the cows don’t produce as much milk. It is like when a lactating mom goes on a starvation diet and loses her milk supply. This is the time of year when milk should be plentiful and cream very rich so week after week I have been ordering raw cream from my farmers and week after week we have heard that there wasn’t enough milk to make cream. One week we even all had to accept less milk than we ordered because of the dry weather. So this past weekend when we were getting our milk when the farmer announced to the gathered crowd “We have cream”. I shouted “Yay!” I was very excited (and glad that I had continued to order it week after week not knowing when it would be available again). When I got home 2 qts of cream went into the dehydrator with my 2 gallons of milk to make it all into yogurt. Today I transformed some of that fermented heavy cream into that heavenly summer food Ice Cream!

When I was at the Grocery store I was looking at the frozen food and frozen peaches caught my eyes. I love peaches but struggle with buying them. They are on the dirty dozen list and so should always be purchased organic. I can’t find local organic peaches and the organic peaches at Whole Foods often taste terrible because they travel long distances and are not tree ripened. Some summers I break down and get a few local sprayed peaches and other years I stay strong and stoutly walk by them week after week at the farmers market not allowing myself to think about what I am missing. My family struggles a lot with toxins that are unavoidable. Adding them via food is not a great idea even occasionally. So I was looking at the frozen organic peaches and I got an idea. Frozen produce is often very flavorful because it can be picked when perfectly ripe and processed and frozen very quickly. Produce in the fresh area of the grocery store is often picked while still green and allowed to ripen on the shelf this results in inferior texture and flavor for many kinds of produce. So that was a long way of saying that I purchased frozen organic peaches intending to make them into peach ice cream.

Raw Peach Ice Cream

• 2 cups fermented raw cream (we like it best made into yogurt. If you can’t get raw cream organic is best but never use uht dairy products of any kind.)
• 10 oz package of organic frozen peaches or 3-4 fresh organic peaches peeled and sliced
• 1/4-1/2 cup honey depending on how sweet you like it
• 3 raw egg yolks
• juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 2 tbsp Organic Orange Extract (made with alcohol to keep the ice cream from freezing too hard) or Grand Marnier (not GAPS Legal)

I made this in a vitamix. It will probably be possible to mix it up in a food processor or less powerful blender but I have not tried it.

Into the vitamix add the frozen peaches, honey, egg yolks, lemon juice and orange extract. Blend till peaches are uniformly small pieces. You don’t want to puree them, just make small pieces. Then add the fermented cream and blend till well mixed, just a short time longer.

If you are using fresh peaches you may want to just dice them up and mix together with the other ingredients by hand.

Pour the mixture into a ice cream maker and let it process till it is set. This makes about 1 qt of mixture and should be about 1.5 qts of ice cream when frozen.

It will be somewhat soft when it is done. You can eat it then as soft serve ice cream or put it into a container in the freezer till it gets hard. This picture shows it after it is just soft serve hard. I couldn’t wait.