A recipe for mulberry ice cream

I love picking mulberries. The fruits are hidden beneath the leaves of the mulberry tree, so it’s only once you’re under the canopy that you can see them.  It feels like stumbling into a cave full of edible treasure.

Mulberries’ flavour is quite difficult to capture. Once you heat the berries they lose their distinctiveness, so I thought I would try making some ice cream using the juice from freshly crushed fruit... and it worked really well. The recipe is basically custard + double cream + fruit = ice cream.

Mulberries ripe for the picking

Mulberry ice cream

250 ml milk

2 egg yolks

1 dsp cornflour (this makes the custard thicken more easily)

50g caster sugar

150ml double cream

Up to 500 g mulberries

First make custard (or buy custard and skip two paragraphs). Whisk together the egg yolks, caster sugar and cornflour. Heat the milk until hot but not boiling and then pour into the egg yolk mixture, whisking as you do so.

Put the mixture back on the stove and heat it slowly until it starts to thicken (don’t let it boil). Then take it off the heat and leave to cool.

Push 400g of the mulberries through a sieve, and then pour them and the double cream into the custard a little at a time. Keep tasting the mixture until you have something you like.

Then break up the remaining mulberries a little, and add them to the mixture for a bit of texture. Pour into an ice cream maker and churn.

Mulberry ice cream - the taste of summer, frozen