Pawpaw Ice Cream

I've never blogged before but the pawpaw has inspired me. The pawpaw is a fruit that grows wild in the woods of Southern Indiana during the fall and we're lucky enough to have a brother-in-law who happens to love pawpaws so much that he cultivates them on our homestead, Brambleberry Farm.

My birthday present this year included two pounds of heirloom Appalachian guinea hog ribs, six pawpaws and a few cups of wild persimmons. If you're at all familiar with these ingredients, you would know that I had just received the makings of a culinary feast. I wish I could say that I made the feast all at once and threw a party, but I didn't. I drove the pork ribs to a friend's in Chicago and let him braise them in some delicious way I didn't pay any attention to, but I kept the pawpaws all to myself. I've been waiting a year to make pawpaw ice cream. I figured ice cream was just the right platform for the humble pawpaw to shine. It's naturally custardy and tastes something like banana (in fact it's nicknamed the Indiana banana), mango, and pineapple.

For the ice cream, I made a basic heavy cream (2 cups), sugar (3/4 cup) and egg yolk (2) custard. You can heat up the cream and sugar first and then temper the eggs before whisking them in, but I prefer to mix it all together cold and whisk it as it warms up slowly and thickens. As the custard cooled, I cut into my completely black (yeah, I thought that meant they were ripe, but in retrospect I should have made the ice cream two days sooner when some green was still left on the poor things) pawpaws and scraped out the flesh, which wasn't as easy as I imagined it would be. The seeds cling on to the flesh more than expected and I definitely overestimated how much fruit I would get from them, but I went with what I had, blended the fruit and some vanilla in with the custard and in about 30 minutes, my cuisinart served up something that looked deceptively vanilla and tasted unexpectedly tropical.

My plan is to serve the pawpaw ice cream with my favorite persimmon pudding, which I would include here, too, but I haven't made it yet. Stay tuned...