Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream

Recently I read a post at Noble Pig that listed several food recipes for a July 4 picnic. The "July 4th Recipes" post included a beautiful photo of Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream. I emailed the post to SP and he agreed that the ice cream looked really tasty and that we should make it for our July 4 gathering. Plus, it was blueberry, one of our favorite flavors, and there was lime in the recipe, and I am still sad that I didn't try the blueberry-lime sorbet I saw at Dave & Andy's last year.

Blueberry Sour Cream Ice Cream is a recipe from Dorie Greenspan in her cookbook Baking From My Home to Yours. It is one of the recipes that the "Tuesdays With Dorie" baking group tried in August 2008.

The first step is to simmer the blueberries with sugar, salt, lime zest, and lime juice until the berries burst.Puree the blueberry mixture, add sour cream and heavy cream, and put in the refrigerator overnight.Sunday morning, we churned it in the ice cream maker.This is our most troublesome and least favorite of the ice creams/sorbets we have made. But we may have brought all the trouble on ourselves because we doubled the recipe.

One reason we stopped at Barnes & Noble on Saturday was that I wanted to look up the yield of this recipe. The quantities seemed small (1 cup blueberries, 3/4 cup heavy cream, 3/4 cup sour cream) and we wanted to have enough ice cream for 9 adults and 2 children. I found the recipe on many of the Tuesdays With Dorie bakers' blogs, but not many mentioned how much it made. I think I did find one site that said 1 quart. We couldn't find Dorie's cookbook at B&N, so we decided to go ahead and double it and just have leftovers.

Everything was fine until Sunday when we churned it. We have a 2 quart ice cream maker, so we figured we'd be OK doubling the recipe. After churning for a while, it overflowed the ice cream maker. There was churned blueberry goop everywhere. So annoying. So messy. Ugh.

The ice cream itself seemed OK, so cleaned up the mess and put the ice cream in the freezer. It wasn't until later that I realized we forgot to add any liquor to keep it soft (although I am still not sure that actually helps, it certainly doesn't hurt to add some). It's a very crumbly ice cream. It does not yield nice, round scoops. I tried to put a nice round scoop in an ice cream bowl for a blog photo, and below is what I got:Crumbly ice cream. Would a bit of booze have helped? Maybe. Not sure.

Also, this wasn't nearly as tasty as we anticipated. It's more sour cream taste than blueberry-lime taste and while I like sour cream, I'd prefer more blueberry-lime taste. Maybe we shouldn't have doubled it, maybe doubling everything isn't the right thing to do, maybe double the blueberries but not the sour cream. It just doesn't taste yummy enough for us to want to try again with a non-doubled amount - especially given that SP is not a fan of sour cream. But those photos on all the Tuesdays With Dorie blogs - they sure do make this ice cream look so yummy and enticing!!!!!