Stracciatella and Amarena Cherry No-Churn Ice Cream Recipe
This is possibly the only ice cream recipe you'll need this summer. With only five ingredients. No ice cream maker needed!
Hello my friends, I hope you are all well and are enjoying summer so far? I can’t quite believe it was summer solstice this weekend just gone, that’s rather snuck up on me, but we did manage to feel a little bit Swedish and celebratory with a lunch of shell-on prawns, crab, salads, mayonnaise and bread with some very good homemade butter.
Since returning from our trip to Sardinia (more on this soon), we’ve been straight back into house renovation madness* and recombobulating, if that’s a word, the children into British eating and sleeping hours. I’ve also been sweltering in the slightly unexpected heat, and with that very much in mind, I’m jumping into your inboxes with this beautiful ice cream recipe I was immediately inspired to create after our blissful time in Italy.
*For those of you interested in our house renovation journey, things are really ramping up in that regard now. I’m on site most days, making decisions with our builder and gearing up for a — gulp — HOPEFULLY August move date. But there is still so much to do! So many decisions yet to be made! But very excitingly, the kitchen is coming in July, and I am obviously beside myself with anticipation for this. I will of course write about this more in future, but for now I guess I’m just too close to it all, though I have been relishing the project and the opportunity to have a hand in creating the home we’ll hopefully live in for many years to come.
Now, to ice cream. And sure, this is a bit of a bold claim, but I’m going to make it anyway. This ice cream (I won’t have the gall to call it gelato, I’ll spare our lovely Italian readers that) is up there with the best dessert recipes I’ve ever developed. And I am really, really hoping it’s going to become a favourite for you too. Aside from developing the recipe, and having a freezer already stocked full of the stuff, I’m sure that this is something I’m going to be making on repeat this summer, and beyond, frankly. It’s already a family favourite, but it’s also impressive and elegant enough to make it a ‘wow’ dessert for any more grown up lunches, dinners and any sort of food-based gathering you might be hosting.
Much of its appeal has to do with the simplicity of it: it uses just five ingredients, takes about ten minutes to prep and then the freezer does the rest. It’s also due to the evergreen nature of the ingredients, whose main stars are the delicious Amarena cherries: beautiful small, glossy, demi-glace red cherries preserved in a sweet, fragrant syrup, and good, bitter dark chocolate. It has to be 70% or more, that’s crucial.
These gorgeous candied cherries, made famous by the Fabbri family and sold in stunning white and blue ceramic pots, strike the perfect balance between being sweet, and also pops of sour, and pair wonderfully with the floofy white clouds of the creamy base and bitter complexity of the dark chocolate. It’s a sort of black cherry gateau moment in ice cream form, and it’s as lovely served in a waffle cone with a fresh drizzle of melted chocolate (if you could be arsed) as it is scooped into pretty little bowls and perhaps dashed with some chopped roasted hazelnuts or pistachios.
During our trip to Sardinia I really embraced a daily gelato ritual. We kept the little ones, and, largely, ourselves, out of the hottest part of the day in the comfort of our air conditioned rooms, and made like the Italians and took siestas after lunch. The heat was quite intense, and we usually woke up feeling rather groggy and disorientated, as you do when you’ve slept in the day. Our solution was to head to the hotel’s own Gelato shop, which, I was amazed to learn, makes all its own gelato from scratch. The cool glass counter of the shop was stocked with generous tubs of the most beautiful swirling gelato, and of course I made my way through the flavours.
There was one flavoured with Amarena cherries, and another classic stracciatella, and I particularly enjoyed eating them together. This gave me the idea of creating this version, with both stacciatella’s fine strands of chocolate and those sweet, almondy little cherries. The result is something very special.
Of course, if you don’t have/can’t get hold of Amarena cherries (you can find them here), or perhaps you have a glut of fresh cherries as they’re in season, you could cook fresh cherries (morellos would be perfect) down in sugar with a dash of almond essence and then stir those, once cool, through the ice cream base. Equally, this is still a lovely stracciatella no-churn without any cherries at all, though I think the way they ripple through the soft white cream is rather magical. Of course you could play around with other fruits: I think a roasted strawberry situation could be rather good here.
In proper, traditional stracciatella gelato, which actually harks from Bergamo in northern Italy, very fine strands of dark chocolate are drizzled into the ice cream base as it’s churned, resulting in the chill of the ice cream cooling and setting the chocolate and creating a beautifully smooth ice cream punctuated with pleasingly crisp bites of chocolate. As this is a low fi, no-churn situation (no idea where my ice cream maker is, must be in a box somewhere), I employed a more DIY technique