Lemon - Raspberry Gelato

Summer was made for ice cream, and our family would get its fix at one of three places: at the cottage we’d go to the Tastee Freeze in Huntsville which purveyed something like molten latex in a cone covered in a brittle chocolate coating; we loved it. In Toronto, it was Hall’s Olde Fashioned Ice cream Parlour where we sat on candy-striped cushioned stools and were served by cheery little hair-netted septuagenarians, or if treated by our father, it was off to St. Clair’s Corso Italia and the quintessential Sicilian Gelateria, La Sem, Toronto’s first licensed outdoor café. Summer transformed the Corso Italia’s sidewalks and curbs into a village piazza where old and young congregated to see and be seen, especially the youth who would go for a passegiatta, a courting ritual performed in one’s Sunday best.
Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for Sunday, or summer to get Sicilian-style gelato; you can make it at home without any special equipment beyond a food processor, a freezer and this easy recipe. Buon Appetito!
Note: Sicilians love flamboyant colour and playful decoration, so feel free to use some of the interesting silicone molds available, even ones for muffins will create individual gelati that you can garnish with biscuits and ‘float’ with a little Prosecco creating an elegant dessert with ease.
Lemon Raspberry Gelato

Serves 4-6

Level of difficulty: easy

Ingredients:

1/2 cup and 1 tbsp. sugar
1 lemon
1 cup 18% cream
1 ½ cups plain full-fat yogurt
3 prepared meringue nests, roughly crushed
¾ cup frozen raspberries in syrup, (thawed with syrup)

Method:

Wash lemon and peel rind with a vegetable peeler, chop the peel coarsely. Juice the lemon and place in a food processor with peel and sugar, process until fine. Then add yogurt and cream, blend mixture for two minutes. Add meringues and blend for two more minutes. Spoon one cup of mixture into a shallow container and stir in raspberries with syrup, pour remaining mixture into another shallow container, cover both containers with plastic wrap and freeze until solid (overnight).
Remove both containers from the freezer, break the lemon gelato into pieces to fit into processor, it will soften upon handling, pulse until slightly slushy, then add the raspberry mixture and pulse again for a few seconds until creamy, but before raspberry mixture is entirely blended into the lemon, you want the effect of a ripple.
Spoon mixture into the desired mold and freeze until firm (6 hours).


Photograph and recipe contributed by Loretta White, a food columnist based-in Chester, Nova Scotia. To read more of Loretta's recipes visit her blog, Food for Thought, at www.southshoreclipper.com

Complementary Wines: Gewürztraminer Late Harvest, Icewine, Riesling: Beerenauslese, Vin Santo

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