I was taunting @meno with homemade gelato and he demanded a photo, so here you go:

This isn't the most visually-appealing gelato I make, but it's awfully tasty. You can see some of the more-visually-appealing ones, and less, at my old Tumblr from when I was doing this more often. It's actually been long enough that I've forgotten some of those and should make them again. Maybe not umeboshi, since only two people liked that one.

Anyway, I realized I haven't actually talked about making gelato here. It's something I used to do a lot, but then our best creamery got into a fight with the power company and eventually went out of business, and our second-best creamery was not very reliable for a long time. But recently there have been a couple other sources for non-homogenized heavy cream, which means I can start up again.

As with most things created from milk products, it's important to start with milk and cream that isn't homogenized and isn't ultra-pasteurized, in order to keep the character of the dairy in the final product. (Regular pasteurization is fine. I haven't ventured into world of unpasteurized milk; I'm close to the cows but not that close.)

It's also important to minimize the number of ingredients. Any commercial ice cream you eat is full of stabilizers to keep it soft, or at least soft-ish, for a long time, and because of that you're missing out on a whole level of good that you can get by making it yourself. This is a four-ingredient recipe, and most of mine are six or less.

• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup Simply Apple juice
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar

I really wanted to use muscovado in this but I ran all around town yesterday without finding any. I know I've bought it here before but either it's gone now or I've forgotten where. So I just ended up with regular brown sugar. It's still really nice.

I waffle between using fresh fruit, commercial purees, and juice, but for apple I thought it was a pretty straightforward decision to use juice, since I don't have, like, an apple press. Even if I did, Simply Apple is so good I probably couldn't do a better job. I'm not actually a big fan of apples, but I had an apple sorbet in Copenhagen that really spoke to me, and I wanted to play with the flavor a little bit. I'll be making a sorbet version tomorrow.

Anyway, this isn't a complicated process, I just mix all the ingredients together and run them through the gelato machine until the texture is right. That's mostly a matter of testing and experience rather than using a timer. I can both see and hear how thick the gelato has become, and take it out at the appropriate moment.

This one was a pretty solid success right away, and I am totally not mad at Meno for insisting on a photo after I had already finished my first serving, and making me go back for seconds.