Poslfit Recipes: Peach-Blueberry Ice Cream

(Prepare blueberry mix) In a small bowl, dissolve 2 T. sugar into the rum, add the blueberries and macerate overnight.

(Prepare ice cream custard) In a medium mixing bowl, beat the 2/3 c. sugar into the eggs, until thickened and pale yellow. Beat in the flour. Bring the milk to a simmer in a heavy medium saucepan (use a good pot, a thin one will heat the milk too unevenly). Beat the hot milk very slowly into the eggs and sugar: you want to dissolve them, not make scrambled eggs. Put the custard back in the saucepan on low heat, and stir constantly until it thickens slightly. Again, if you heat it too quickly, or don't keep stirring, you'll get scrambled eggs and have to start over; this is the trickiest part. The whole point of doing all this is to sterilize the eggs; if you are 100% sure the eggs are fine (say because you've been buying them from the same farmer for thirty years and eating them raw without getting sick), you could skip this modern innovation and just blend in cold milk. Pour hot custard through a strainer into a large, clean bowl. Allow it to cool slightly, then add the cream. Refrigerate until cold. If you're in a hurry, pop it in the freezer for 15 minutes, stirring halfway through; if you're not in a hurry, do this the night before and just leave the custard in the fridge.

(Prepare peach mix) Peel and pit the peaches, place in blender. Peaches vary quite a lot in overall size and ratio of edible portion to inedible portion; you want somewhere in the range of 4 to 8 peaches. You should be making this recipe in peach season, so just buy a big basket to make sure you've got enough; they won't go to waste. Add the peach nectar (if it's a really good year for peaches, you can probably leave this out), the lemon juice and zest, and salt. Blend until the peaches are pureed.

(Freezing the custard) Add the vanilla to the blueberries, mix with 1/4 of the custard. Mix the remaining custard with the peaches. Make the peach ice cream according to your ice cream maker's instructions, stopping while it's still a little soft. Put it in two containers in your freezer to continue setting. Immediately (before the ice cream maker warms up) continue with the blueberry ice cream. When the blueberry ice cream is as cold as it will get (it won't be as hard as the peach, because of the rum, and the warmer ice cream maker), layer it on top of the first half of the peach ice cream, then transfer the second half of the peach ice cream on top of that.

(Serving) Allow the ice cream to keep setting for at least an hour in the freezer (overnight is fine). Pop the entire three-layer batch out of the container upside down onto a plate, then slice to reveal the peach-blueberry-peach structure. Garnish with mint sprigs, serve immediately.