Perfecting the Perfect Peach

There are about a thousand (million) recipes out there for peach ice cream. But there are very very few peach ice creams that are actually good. Haagen-Daaz makes a peach sorbet that is great, and even better when paired with raspberry or mango sorbet. Sorbet is fairly straightforward--fruit, sugar, and water. However, of those millions (billions) of peach ice cream recipes I've seen lately, I don't think there are two that are alike. Some have a custard base--with as many as 10 egg yolks--and then some use only heavy cream or heavy cream and whole milk or half-and-half and some other percentage of milk or half-and-half and heavy cream, etc. Are the peaches cooked? And if so, are they roasted or cooked down in a syrup? Vanilla extract or almond? Peach liqueur? Too many decisions. So after considering the billions (trillions) of recipes out there, I decided to go with my new favorite ice cream guy, David Lebovitz, whose cookbook, The Perfect Scoop, is fun to both read and cook from. His recipe combines pureed cooked peaches with sugar, vanilla, sour cream, and heavy cream. I substituted half-and-half for the heavy cream and added a little almond essence in addition to the vanilla. The result? An ice cream that's high in peach flavor--which is hard to do when you're adding all that cream--but it's not quite as creamy and smooth as I was hoping for, quite possibly because of my detour from the recipe. Ahem. It's still peach season, however, and I won't mind testing this recipe again. :-D