Make Ahead

This sauce is easy to put together and is lovely served with any of the dark chocolate ice creams or sorbets in this book. I appreciate it for its creamy sweetness, and it rarely fails to impress. Be sure to use top-quality, real white chocolate, which is actually ivory colored, due to an abundance of pure cocoa butter.

Serve the delicate, rosy crystals of this granita with a pour of sparkling wine, making a rather sophisticated slushie. Or perfume it with a few drops of fragrant rosewater sprinkled over to transform it into something curiously exotic and a bit elusive.

If you don’t have fresh passion fruit or pulp, make do by adding more tangerine juice. But I do advise looking around for it (see Resources, page 237), since its unmistakable flavor gives this sorbet an authentic taste of the tropics.

If you’ve ever gone shopping at the Fairway Market on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, you’ve found that the simple act of buying a good basket of strawberries has become a full-contact sport. Never in my life have I left a market with so many bumps and bruises! Next time I go, I’m wearing football gear to protect myself from the combative shoppers who wield their carts like modern-day jousting vehicles, ready to take on any and all oncoming produce shoppers who might happen to be heading toward the basket of berries they’ve set their sights on. If you think this is just an East Coast phenomenon, you should visit the Berkeley Bowl, in California, where people who’ve just parked their Volvos with fading “Make Love, Not War” bumper stickers are more than happy to hike up their drawstring pants and trample you with their Birkenstocks while homing in on their berries. But no matter where you live, I recommend that you take the trouble and assume all risks to find good strawberries with which to make this intensely flavored sorbet at home, where you’re safe and sound.

One of the funniest (albeit most excruciating) things I’ve ever seen was a videotaped appearance of a cookbook author making a rhubarb pie on a live morning television show. Just as the cameras began rolling, the cocky, self-assured host looked at his guest and blurted out, “I hate rhubarb. I mean, I really hate it.” The poor dear continued to make her rhubarb pie, but it was easy to see that his constant grousing was taking its toll on her as she baked, bantered, and defended her delicious-looking pie for a few painful on-air minutes. If it were me, I would have taken a different approach. With the cameras rolling, I would have ordered him out of the studio and pulled another person into the kitchen who looked forward to the first rhubarb in the spring with the same anticipation that I do. Look for stalks that are bright red, which will make the most enticingly colored sorbet. The flavor of the gently stewed ruhubarb with fresh strawberries will remind you why this combination is so beloved by almost everyone, including me.

It’s easy to forget that citrus fruits do have a specific season, since they seem abundant all year round. The major exception is tangerines, which are rarely seen except during the winter. My favorite varieties for making this sorbet are the oddly shaped tangelos, whose juice is mischievously tart, and the mottled honey tangerines, whose coarse, funky exterior belies the bright-colored and exceptionally sweet juice within.

I wouldn’t dream of visiting the vast Central Market in Florence without my friend Judy Witts, known throughout town as the Divina Cucina. With Judy as my guide, butchers and cheese merchants greet us like given-up-for-lost family members, and everywhere we turn another oversized platter appears, heaped with Tuscan delights: sheep’s-milk pecorino, candied fruits spiced with mustard seeds, fresh raspberries dotted with syrupy balsamic vinegar, and, gulp, juicy tripe sandwiches (which I haven’t built up the courage to try). And because we’re in Italy, it all ends with shots of grappa taken straight from little glass vials, obbligatorio after all that sampling. This sorbetto is adapted from Judy’s recipe. One of her favorite parts is the little chocolate “seeds” it contains. Since watermelons have a lot of water, take the sorbetto out of the freezer long enough ahead of serving to make it scoopable, 5 to 10 minutes. To pass the time, serve shots of grappa, and if there’s any left by serving time, splash some over the sorbetto too.

I’ll admit that my favorite selection from the shiny white Good Humor jalopy that cruised our neighborhood was simply called Toasted Coconut: vanilla ice cream on a stick, coated with lots of sugary-sweet coconut. On the last fateful day that I’d ever see the Good Humor man, the bully next door decided to spray him with water from a hose as he slowly circled our block. He beat a hasty retreat and never came back. Being blackballed by the Good Humor man made that the worst summer of my life. I don’t know what happened to the neighborhood bully, but now that I’m an adult I can have Toasted Coconut Ice Cream whenever I want. And I do. This ice cream is pictured marbled with Mango Sorbet (page 108).

This frozen yogurt is a snap to put together, especially welcome in the summer which is when you may want to limit your time in a warm kitchen. But don’t let its ease of preparation fool you; this vibrantly colored frozen yogurt provides the biggest blast of strawberry flavor imaginable.

Brilliant pink fresh strawberry ice cream is a classic flavor and, along with chocolate and vanilla, is an American favorite. I’m a big fan of any kind of berries served with tangy sour cream, but I think strawberries are the most delicious, especially when frozen into a soft, rosy red scoop of ice cream. Macerating the strawberries beforehand magically transforms even so-so berries into fruits that are brilliantly red. Try to eat this ice cream soon after it’s been churned.

This recipe comes from Barbara Tropp, the woman who introduced many Americans to the wonders of Chinese cooking. But she was also one of those people who was just absolutely lovely to be around in every respect. She was deservedly popular in the food community and left many great recipes behind as her legacy, including this famous lemon ice cream. It was passed on to me by Susan Loomis, a dear friend we both had in common. I made it, ate one spoonful, and immediately found another reason to love, and miss, Barbara. It’s superbly lemony and clean…and as zesty as Barbara was herself.

I’ve spent many a summer night enjoying an ice cream cone, flanked by Mexican and Filipino families, at Mitchell’s Ice Cream in San Francisco’s Mission District. This ice cream is inspired by ube, the sweet potato ice cream they serve up in addition to all the other exotic flavors they offer. Mitchell’s is so popular that the place is just as packed when the inevitable summer fog rolls in and chills things down as it is when the sun is shining. There’s always a line. But don’t think for a minute that the flavor of this ice cream is too adventurous. Imagine a nice slab of spiced pumpkin pie; this ice cream delivers that classic flavor in one neat scoop of ice cream. The best sweet potatoes to use are a vivid, electric orange. I try to find the brightest orange ones when shopping. Don’t tell, but sometimes I scrape a bit of the skin off one, just to check.

While navigating my way through the Barcelona train station, I was suddenly surrounded by a squadron of Spanish police, guns drawn, barking orders at me in Spanish. Aimed and ready, they gestured to me to open up the suspiciously overstuffed valise I was dragging. I carefully unzipped my bulky suitcase, revealing rows and rows of peculiar brown paper-wrapped bundles, all packed neatly in rows. An officer demanded that I unwrap one of the packages. I slowly tore the paper off the first one and held it high for all to see. The policemen let down their guns and had a good laugh. My crime? Smuggling home blocks of crispy Spanish turrón. This ice cream duplicates the taste of turrón with crispy almonds, honey, and a touch of candied orange, and it can be made, without raising any suspicions, in your ice cream maker at home.

I live above a huilerie in Paris, a shop that sells top-quality oils from all over the world. I decided that Colette, the owner, would be my primary ice cream taste tester. Not only did she have an excellent palate and love to taste things, but I knew that, being French, she’d have absolutely no problem expressing her opinions, good or bad. This was her favorite of all the ice creams I made. Her eyes rolled back in her head when she slipped the first spoonful in her mouth. “Oh lá lá,” she exclaimed.

True zabaglione—a foamy custard of egg yolks, wine, and sugar—is often made to order in Italian restaurants. Moments after the waiter takes your order, you’ll hear the frenetic “clang-clack-clang” of the whisk hitting the copper bowl in the kitchen. Once it’s reached a billowy peak, it’s heaped into a glass quickly but not necessarily neatly (speed trumps presentation with zabaglione) and served straight up and warm. In season, you’ll often find sliced strawberries buried underneath all that delicious froth. Zabaglione Gelato captures the taste of a true zabaglione in a cool scoop of ice cream without the last-minute flurry of activity, and it’s just as good served with lots of juicy strawberries.

Crack open a cherry or apricot pit and you’ll discover a soft kernel inside with the pronounced scent of bitter almonds. I took a cue from whatever higher power designed these two flavors together and paired cherries with almonds in one heavenly ice cream. Adding anything chocolate makes this ice cream amazingly good. Be sure to drain the cherries in a strainer very well before folding them into the ice cream. They should be dry and sticky before you chop them up and mix them in.

Do you know how tin roof ice cream got its name? Neither do I. Nor does anyone, it seems. I’ve tried to find out but have always come up empty-handed. I do know that it’s one of my favorite ice cream combinations, and I guess I need to be content with that. Tin roof sundaes are traditionally made of vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate sauce and a scattering of red-skinned Spanish peanuts. I couldn’t resist using chocolate-covered peanuts instead and folding them into the ice cream, where they become embedded between layers of fudge ripple.

I really like frozen yogurt, but only if it’s homemade. So don’t expect this to taste like the frozen yogurt that squirts out of the machine at the mall. That kind is loaded with so much other stuff that any similarity to real yogurt is purely coincidental. Homemade frozen yogurt has a delightful tanginess and is a bit lighter than traditional ice cream. I choose to keep mine pure, relying on good whole-milk yogurt to provide much of the flavor. If you do want to make a dense, richer frozen yogurt, see the variation below.

Vietnamese food is perhaps my favorite of all the cuisines in the world, and I would eat it every single night if I could. At the start of every Vietnamese meal, I order a Vietnamese coffee. A glass with a sweet dose of condensed milk is brought to the table with a well-worn stainless-steel filter balanced on top, dripping steaming hot coffee into the thick, sweet milk. Once brewed, it all gets stirred up and ice is added. I thought the flavors would make an excellent ice cream, and I was right.

Sometimes I’m afraid to admit that I love white chocolate. Purists argue, “It’s not real chocolate.” Although that may technically be true, who cares? (French fries aren’t “real chocolate” either…yet they’re pretty darn good.) So I don’t compare it to dark chocolate, since it’s a whole other ballgame. White chocolate’s creamy-smooth, delicate cocoa butter flavor is perfect when melted and stirred into ice cream, and the result makes a truly outstanding dessert when topped with Sour Cherries in Syrup (page 185). And I’ve yet to come across any chocolate cake that couldn’t be improved by a scoop of white chocolate ice cream melting seductively alongside.