Fruit ice cream is most satisfying when it tastes and feels like you are eating fresh fruit. This is referred to as “mouth feel”. You achieve that by using high quality ripe fruit, by saturating the fruit with the right amount of sugar so the water in the fruit does not turn icy when it freezes, by adding the fruit juice to the mix to get the intense fruit flavor, and then by adding pieces of mashed sugar soaked fruit, berry seeds, and fruit pulp after the ice cream is frozen, so that people get small chunks of fruit and seeds they can taste and feel, rather than just a generalized mushy fruit flavor.
If you put all of your fruit in a blender or food processor it turns into a liquid that has flavor but no texture. It also grinds up berry seeds, giving the ice cream a gritty feel. I mash all of my fruit by hand using a potato masher, which leaves small, mashed chunks of fruit. I mix in the correct amount of sugar to bring the fruit to a 25% sugar content. Note that all of our recipes show the correct amount of sugar to add to the fruit to bring the fruit to 25% sugar. Separately, under the Ice Cream Base Mix part of the recipe we list the amount of sugar to put in our base mix to bring it to 25% sugar.
If you want to be more precise for the fruit you have (it may be riper or more sour than what we wrote the recipe for), or if you are making your own recipe for an unusual fruit that we don’t have a recipe for like pear, plum, guava, papaya, dragon fruit, etc., you can use a portable refractometer to measure the sugar content of the fruit and then follow the instructions in the section Calculating Sugar to Add to Fruit to calculating how much sugar to add to the fruit.
I add some citric acid or lemon juice so the fruit doesn’t turn brown, then let it sit for several hours so the sugar soaks into the fruit. Lemon juice works best for some fruits like berries where it adds a nice tartness. However, with some recipes the lemon flavor can overwhelm the other fruit flavors, in which case I use citric acid instead.
Then I strain the fruit through a strainer using a large metal spoon to press most of the fruit through the strainer. The fruit and fruit juice that passes through the strainer is put in the blender along with the other Ice Cream Base Mix recipe ingredients and is then frozen in the ice cream freezer.
The fruit pulp, berry seeds, etc. that did not make it through the strainer are set aside, and then added to the frozen ice cream during the last minute or so of freezing, just long enough to be mixed in but not ground up.
Whole berries, mashed berries, refractometer, adding sugar
