How to Make Gelato at Home Without an Ice Cream Machine
Recently, I set out on a quest to perfect my very own gelato recipe – one exactly to my liking – in the hope of ditching store-bought ice cream forever.
For fruit ice cream, it’s important to use only ripe, seasonal fruit. In my case, that meant three nectarines (380 grams, including the pits). Radicioni swears by keeping the peel on, saying it adds flavour and colour to the final result.
First, you should soak the nectarines in a mixture of water and baking soda (a spoonful per litre) for an hour. Then rinse the fruit, chop it finely and blend, adding 98 grams of sugar. If your nectarines aren’t ripe enough, you might want to add a little more for extra sweetness.
For the cream-based ice cream, mix 45 grams of egg-yolk, 265 ml of whole milk, 16 ml of cream and 56 grams of sugar in a saucepan, bringing the mixture up to a temperature of 82 degrees, while whisking constantly.
For extra flavour, you can add lemon or orange rind, vanilla pods or even half a glass of marsala. After the mixture reaches 82 degrees, take it off the heat and leave it to cool completely.
Now comes the most important part: the churning. If you don’t have an ice cream maker, you can use a regular hand mixer, or simply a whisk and every single muscle in your arm.
Put your mixture of choice in a metal bowl in the freezer for a few minutes before churning, then take it out and whisk energetically for about ten minutes, before putting it back in.
Take your ice cream out of the freezer every 30 minutes and whisk for another ten minutes, for a total of four times over the course of two hours. (Not mandatory, but during the churning process I threw some pieces of dark chocolate into the mix.)