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Strawberry Ice Cream

Spring says strawberries to me. I answered the call by making a batch of strawberry ice cream. For the base, I used a slight variation of Alton Brown's vanilla ice cream recipe. His recipe has no eggs but uses a combination of whipping cream and half-and-half; I loaded it up entirely with whipping cream. I added to the scalded cream a combination of fresh organic strawberries and some organic strawberry preserves from last summer. A quick pass of the stick blender pureed everything.

Here is the ice cream after a run through the KitchenAid. The volume increased 3 or 4 times. I borrowed a trick from Cook's Illustrated and dished the ice cream into a cold metal cake pan. Cooling it in a thin layer helps to reduce the freezing time and reduce the formation of ice crystals. I managed a few bites from the bowl scrapings---rich and strawberry-ey.

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