Strawberries and Chocolate

We are still making our way through the 16 quarts of strawberries. So far we have made Strawberry-Lime Sorbet, strawberry vinaigrette (if I figure out exactly what I did, I'll post a recipe), strawberry daiquiris (recipe turned out only so-so, so I'm not posting that one) and the recipe I'm sharing today.

In addition to wanting to find uses for our surplus of strawberries, I discovered that I had some sour cream in the refrigerator that was in danger of going bad and I thought maybe I could use it in some sort of strawberry recipe. It didn't take me long to find this post from Dagmar at a cat in the kitchen, reviewing an ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz's A Perfect Scoop. An ice cream that called for strawberries and sour cream - perfect! Until I found a recipe over at eggs on sunday for basically the same ice cream, but with bittersweet chocolate drizzled in. Even more perfect!

I tend to prefer custard-based ice creams - they are richer, denser and creamier. Cream-based ice cream tends to be, well, icy. But I was game to give this one a go, just to use up the sour cream. I was also heartened by the fact that it called for a bit of vodka, something that I swear by when making sorbets to keep them a bit soft, instead of hardening up into blocks of ice.

Strawberry-Sour Cream Stracciatella Ice Cream

The chocolate part comes at the very end, when the ice cream has pretty much finished churning - you just drizzle the melted chocolate in thin streams and let it mix in your ice cream machine. As the chocolate hits the ice cream, it hardens and breaks up into very small pieces, giving you just a little bit of bittersweet chocolate in every bite.

This recipe was a bit too much for my Cuisinart ice cream machine - the ice cream mixture began to overflow the bowl toward the end, so I'd have to either cut the recipe back or churn it in two batches next time.

This ice cream isn't as lush and rich as I usually crave, but the flavors are fantastic. The sweet tang of strawberries hits you first. As the ice cream sits in your mouth, the frozen bits of chocolate begin to warm up and leave you with a nice finish of luscious, bittersweet chocolate.

If you like chocolate covered strawberries, you'll love this ice cream. As I wrote up this post, I stumbled upon this custard-based recipe for stracciatella ice cream. Looks divine! Guess I know what we'll be trying with some of our frozen strawberries later on this summer!