The Best Homemade Lemon Ice Cream!
This recipe (adapted from Gourmet) forms part of another – Frozen Lemon Gingersnap Pie – which I will share with you in another post. There’s something so quintessentially summer whenever lemons are mentioned in a recipe, making any day of the year sunny. Flavored shaved ice (precursor to ice cream) has been used for thousands of years. In China, a frozen mixture of milk and rice was used as far back as 200 BC (ref: BBC, October 26, 2009). Roman Emperor Nero had ice brought down from the mountains and combined it with fruit. Arabs used milk rather than fruit juices in their ice cream. In the 10th century ice cream was being made throughout the Arab cities. They used milk or cream and sometimes yogurt flavored with rose water, dried fruits and nuts.
I love trying different flavors but this lemon ice cream has to be the best one I have savored in a very long time.
- 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
- 1 cup whole milk
- 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
- 4 teaspoons finely grated fresh lemon zest
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- 6 large egg yolks
- 2/3 cup fresh lemon juice
Was looking for a lemon ice cream recipe and this sounds great. I’ve never made ice cream with eggs – I am wondering, do you know if recipes with eggs call for heating to kill any bacteria in the eggs or is it for texture? I use safe pastured eggs and would prefer to include them raw, but don’t want to harm the texture…. thanks!
Hi Alysia, this is a custard-style base and the eggs are added to create the custard. Hope this helps. Cheers!
I haven’t even gotten to pour it into the ice cream maker yet, but the flavor of the custard is incredible. I had a batch of Meyer lemons to use, so I’m in lemon custard heaven. Thanks for the wonderful recipe. Keeper for sure.
Thanks Syed. It’s so good you’ll find yourself making more. Cheers!
This has turned into my family’s favorite ice cream and my favorite base, it’s perfectly sweet, creamy and so yummy! Way better than anything you can buy in the store. I’ve been subbing 1/4c – 1/2c diced fruit for the zest and Kerns nectar for the lemon juice (with some flavors I keep 1tbsp) and every flavor I’ve tried has come out excellent. Thank you for sharing this, it’s going into my multi-generational family recipe book as one of my contributions to pass onto my daughters.
I forgot I also sometimes add 1tbsp vanilla (and no lemon juice), again, depending on the fruit/flavor I’m making.
[…] I saw The Best Homemade Lemon Ice Cream at The Culinary Chase, I didn’t think twice and decided to give it a try. Maybe I would find the […]