Cherry Garcia Ice Cream
A homemade batch for the winners of the inaugural TOIC!
As a prize for winning the first ever Tournament of Ice Cream, I decided to make a batch of homemade Cherry Garcia for friend of the blog Adrian and his family. Before getting into all that, I have a quick digression about the Tournament itself. Over the past few weeks, my family and I have been sampling some of the tournament contenders we had never tried before. As such, I have a few notes to share on what we tasted:
Jeni’s High Five Candy Bar - this is not one of Jeni’s best offerings. It was good enough—tastes like a Snickers bar—but there are way better Jeni’s flavors, IMHO.
Talenti Raspberry Sorbet - the taste and texture were both good. But it was also very sweet, and a bit too one note for me to consider buying it ever again.
Tillamook Mudslide - I thought this was quite good, but I thought the quality of the ice cream was not as good as Haagen Dazs, which I sampled at the same time (see the next bullet point).
Haagen Dazs Chocolate Peanut Butter - Delicious. The quality of the ice cream was excellent, and the overall combination of chocolate and peanut butter is addictive.
Straus Mint Chip - Also delicious. Straus makes excellent ice cream. The only negative for me is that it uses peppermint extract as the flavoring agent, and as I’ve said before, I find fresh mint flavor to be superior.
Miharu Qahwa Coffee - this is one of the best ice creams I’ve ever had. The combination of the coffee flavor with cardamom was just incredible, and the texture was perfect. When I told friend of the blog Shin about this, they demanded a recount of the votes! 🤣
The most important takeaway is that my ice cream horizons have been expanded, for which I am very grateful. Now onto this week’s recipe!
Here’s the ingredient lineup:
And this is the recipe I used. I have no idea if it’s faithful to how Ben and Jerry’s actually makes Cherry Garcia, but it seemed close enough.
The first step is to make the cherry sauce / stewed cherry mix-in. Pitting cherries is a real pain, but luckily, we have a pitter!
You cook the cherries for about 30 minutes and then strain them, reserving both the sauce and the cooked cherries to mix into the ice cream later. Once that’s done, you put the sauce and cherries in the refrigerator to cool.
With the cherries and cherry sauce prepped, next you make the ice cream base. This recipe calls for a basic custard base using six egg yolks. As with last week’s ice cream, I chose to use only five egg yolks.
Making a custard base has become easy enough for me, but as always, the documentation is spotty given that making a custard, just like gun control, means using both hands.1
Once the custard has cooled, you add the heavy cream, (cooled) cherry sauce, and a bit of vanilla extract…
…and then put the whole thing into the fridge to chill. I left it in the fridge for about 10 hours before doing a late night churn.
Took a quick pic of the mix-ins as I began adding them in:
And finally, the final results of my batch alongside the real thing!
That’s the Ben & Jerry’s on the left, and my version on the right. I forgot to take photos when we first scooped up, which is why the scoops and the photo quality are both a bit shoddy.
Anyway, my version came out really good. Excellent in fact! All four of us liked the pronounced cherry flavor and the large number of cherries mixed in throughout. And the texture of the ice cream was great.
And yet, the real Cherry Garcia, with it’s subtle almond cherry flavor, still won the taste test for most of us. In addition to its great flavor, the chocolate flakes in the Ben & Jerry’s are better than the chocolate chips I used. And even though my cherry mix in was delicious, the quality of the B&J cherries was slightly better. There may not be as many cherries in the B&J version, but we were speculating that they might be dried somewhat, and therefore they don’t have any of the iciness present in the cherries in my version.
But honestly, we’re splitting hairs here. I spoke with Adrian and he said he liked my version better.
At the end of the day, I’m really happy with how my version came out, and doing this taste test was delightful. It’s making me think I should try some other copycat recipes.
That’s all for now. See you next week!
If you find this joke to be in poor taste, I don’t blame you. I also find the gun control sentiment articulated here to be indicative of a mindset that is crass, juvenile, and, frankly, degenerate. I’m just finding laughs wherever I can.
And speaking of the degenerate nature of the American psyche (or at least a substantial portion thereof), I listened to Lou Reed’s “Last Great American Whale” the other day and found Reed’s unapologetic disdain for the cruelty, stupidity, and immaturity that is so rampant in America to be quite refreshing. I recommend giving it a listen. It also reminded me of how an old friend and I made Last Great American Whale t-shirts back in college. Might be a good time to bring those back…
tee shirt please