A couple of weeks ago, it got uncomfortably hot. Not hot like it gets in the southern river valley where I grew up, and not even that hot for some other more northern climates, but hot enough for me in my un-air conditioned apartment. So instead of baking for desserts, I decided to put my ice cream maker to good use. One of the ingredients I’ve been thinking about for a while is the prickly pear fruits that my local grocer carries. There are few recipes I had been considering, but I decided to slightly improvise a sorbet based on this Lime Mango Sorbet from Simply Recipes.

First, the prickly pear fruits need to be juiced, and this procedure I learned also at Simply Recipes. The ones I bought at the store had already been cleaned of their fuzzy needles and were perfectly safe to handle with my bare hands.

First, the ends get cut off.

One longitudinal slice down the end, and the skin gets pried/sliced partly off to start. Once you get it started, you can pull it the rest of the way off pretty easily.

Once they’ve been skinned, they take a quick spin in the food processor.

It didn’t take long at all to reduce the prickly pears to juice. It is at this point that most recipes launch; the prickly pear juice (after straining the seeds out) can be used in baking, added to cocktails or lemonade, or made into sorbet!

All the sorbet recipes I found had a base that is just simple syrup. Stir your sugar and water until the water turns clear again.

The zest of one lime goes into the syrup to infuse it with lime flavor. I think at this point, before adding anything else, I would strain the zest back out. In the final product the zest clumped together oddly, and while though not horribly unpleasant, was a little too much lime in one bite.

The seeds of prickly pears are edible, but are very hard and are large enough be unmissable Since they would not be a pleasant addition to a sorbet, I strained them out. However, I did want the pulp. This would probably have been easier with a slightly larger grade strainer, but using a spoon to push everything but the seeds through worked ok.

This is what was left over when I called it quits. I got pretty much all the pulp out and into the bowl below. After juicing 5 smallish prickly pears, I got about a cup of liquid and pulp, which is what I was aiming for.

Adding liquor to the sorbet adds a bit of a kick, plus it keeps the sorbet from getting too icy. I chose a good rum to play on the tropical flavors in the sorbet.

Even after setting in the freezer for days, the alcohol kept the sorbet super soft. It melts quickly in the heat, but the texture is fantastic. And the combination of the sweet prickly pear, which is almost melon-like in taste, and the tart lime is delicious. The sorbet was ridiculously easy since all it is composed of is simple syrup and fruit, so there’s no cooking of a custard like in other ice creams. It’s one of those things that would be great to whip together on a whim, just as long as the ice cream maker was clean and ready!

Prickly Pear Lime Sorbet (adapted from Simply Recipes)

Ingredients

• 1 cup water
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• zest from one lime
• 1 cup prickly pear juice and pulp (about 5 small fruits)
• 1/2 cup of lime juice
• pinch of salt
• 2 tablespoons rum

Directions

1. Heat the sugar, water, and lime zest in a medium saucepan until the sugar has completely dissolved. Set aside to cool and strain out lime zest.
2. Juice the prickly pears and separate the pulp and juice from the seeds.
3. Put the prickly pear juice, simple syrup, lime juice, and salt into a bowl and mix well. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until completely chilled.
4. When ready to put the chilled mixture into your ice cream maker, mix in the rum. Process the mixture in your ice cream maker according to the ice cream maker directions. Transfer mixture to a plastic storage container and freezer in your freezer until firm, at least 6 hours.

I had never made homemade ice cream before, but seeing a bunch of delicious looking ice cream recipes around, and knowing that I would be around all summer without air conditioning, inspired me to pick up an ice cream maker. I decided to get this popular machine from Cuisinart, and was lucky enough to find a never opened, new-in-box one on Craigslist for half the retail price. As far as deciding what my inaugural ice cream would be, it was almost an obvious choice when I considered the small amount of cookie dough in my freezer left over from the cookie cake pie. By making a good vanilla custard base (this Essential Vanilla Ice Cream from Serious Eats) and mixing in pieces of the cookie dough, I would have a perfect chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

Good vanilla ice cream is based on real vanilla beans, not extract. I happened to have a bundle of vanilla beans in the freezer that I brought home from Madagascar and I hadn’t done much with except make vanilla sugar. I thawed one out and it worked perfectly. You can just see the black, glinting beads inside the split open pod in this picture… all of those have to be scraped out, and they’re what makes black dots in good vanilla ice cream.

Here they’re all scraped out into the cream and sugar mixture, which is being heated. The pod goes in too because it has a lot of flavor as well.

Ice cream takes a lot of egg yolks, which is in part why this is so yellow. The custard—basically cream, sugar and egg whites—is cooked down until “the custard coats the spoon”, which is supposedly what you’re seeing here. A finger swiped across the back of the spoon should leave a clear trail, although I found that this was true fairly early on before the custard had thickened much. You can also use a candy thermometer and wait until it hits 170–175ºF, which I did as confirmation because I like that scientific accuracy.

Once the custard has cooked to the right stage, it is poured through a strainer (to remove any lumps) into a container in an ice water bath. Most recipes recommend that you refrigerate your custard overnight at this point to make sure it is cold before adding it to your ice cream maker for optimal freezing. After a night in the fridge my custard was pretty thick, like pudding, and into the ice cream maker it went.

With five minutes remaining on the freezing cycle of your ice cream maker it’s time to add any mix-ins, in my case cookie dough. Here is about a cup and a half chopped into small pieces, which were a little big still for my ice cream maker, but it got over it and mixed them in. Note: this is not an egg-less cookie dough recipe, which means it is not 100% safe for eating raw. I like to live on the wild side, however, and I had not been made sick previously by this batch, so I used it anyway.

After the freezing cycle of the ice cream maker it’s best for the ice cream to go into a container and into a freezer for curing. Be sure not to pack it in too tight, you don’t want to push out all the air that the ice cream maker worked to put in.

This recipe was great, and I would definitely use it again if I needed a basic vanilla ice cream recipe. The cookie dough worked perfectly, just like chocolate cookie dough ice cream you would buy, only better.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (adapted from Serious Eats)

Ingredients

• 1 vanilla bean
• 1 cup half-and-half
• 2 cups whipping cream
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 6 egg yolks
• 1 1/2 cups chocolate chip cookie dough, chopped into small pieces

Directions

1. Split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape the fine black seeds into a non-corroding saucepan. Add the vanilla bean pod, half-and-half, cream, and sugar, and warm the mixture over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved.
2. Whisk the egg yolks just enough to mix them and whisk in some of the hot cream mixture. Return to the pan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until the custard coats the spoon, or a thermometer reads 170–175ºF.
3. Strain into a storage container through a medium-fine strainer to remove any lumps that may have formed, scraping as much of the vanilla bean through the strainer as you can. Recover the vanilla bean pod from the strainer and put them in the container to flavor the ice cream mixture while it chills. Cover the container tightly and chill the custard thoroughly (preferably over night). When you are ready to freeze the mixture, remove the vanilla bean pod. Freeze according to the directions for your ice cream maker.
4. In the last 5–10 minutes of the freezing cycle, add in chopped up cookie dough a little at a time, and let your ice cream maker mix until incorporated.
5. Store your ice cream in non-reactive containers—plastic or glass—tightly covered. Place in the freezer to allow to “set” overnight, or as long as you can wait to eat some.