Gelato al Limone

Here's a lost post from about a year ago that never made it out of the draft state!  Just as relevant today (though my most recent use of my ice cream maker was mango frozen yogurt, which you can find a recipe for here, if you're so inclined)... but anyway, here's that year-old post:

OMG, You Guys. Lemon gelato.

I don't use my ice cream maker as often as I'd like, in fact I think I didn't even use it once last summer, and I only just brought it out of the freezer this past week, but I intend to make up for lost time and make a lot of gelato for the rest of the summer (also sorbetto). Possibly weekly.

I saw a lot of recipes on the internet (some using just milk, some with egg yolks, various amounts of cream, etc) for lemon gelato (this is the simplest, and it actually seems both amazing and ridiculously effort-free, I might try it next) but I ended up adapting this one. 

My main change was a kind of chemistry experiment - I know from some sorbet recipes I've made (and from Cook's Illustrated) that adding a little alcohol of some kind keeps frozen desserts from getting too hard once they spend a day in the freezer (a problem I ran into this past weekend making a ricotta gelato recipe from a Mario Batali cookbook, a type of gelato thickened with cornstarch instead of eggs).

Anyway, I didn't have quite as much lemon juice as the recipe called for, and I wanted to see if I could avoid the rock-hard-the-next-day problem, so I filled out my scant lemon juice with some triple sec (a citrusy liqueur, you could use Grand Marnier or Cointreau if you were fancy enough to have it in the house). It worked beautifully! The day I made it, the gelato was almost as soft as soft serve, after the requisite 2 hours in the freezer, and the next day it was totally scoopable, actually legitimately gelato textured like you'd get at a gelateria.

Gelato al limone
makes about 2 quarts
adapted from a recipe on tasteofhome.com

1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
4 lemons
5 egg yolks
triple sec or any other citrus or lemon flavored alcohol product
2 cups heavy cream
vanilla and lemon extracts (optional)

Using a vegetable peeler, peel zest in big strips (avoiding the white pith) off three of the lemons. Add the zest to a medium-large heavy bottomed pot along with the milk and sugar, and put over medium heat, stirring occasionally with a heat proof spatula to help the sugar dissolve. 
Heat to 175 degrees (if you don't have a thermometer, it should just start to steam on the surface, not bubble or boil at all).

While the milk/zest mixture heats, beat the egg yolks lightly in a 2 quart metal bowl and prepare an ice water bath in another larger bowl (preferably metal, and big enough for the 1st bowl to snug down into later).

Squeeze the 4 lemons of their juice, into a measuring cup* - you should ideally have about 1/2 cup juice. Add triple sec to bring the volume up to 2/3 cup.

When the milk is hot, slowly whisk it into the yolks, a very little bit at a time. If you rush this tempering process, you'll have lemony scrambled eggs, so take your time. Once you've got about half of the milk mixture beaten in, you can go ahead and add the rest more quickly.

Return this milk/egg/zest mixture to the pan, and put it over medium heat, stirring, until it reaches 160 degrees. 

If you don't have a thermometer (get a thermometer!) it should coat the back of a spoon at this point. Pour it back into your smaller metal bowl, and place that bowl in the ice water bath. Stir until fairly cool, if you have time (if you don't, you'll have to leave the finished mixture in the fridge a lot longer before you can put it in your ice cream maker, 6-8 hours, as opposed to the 3 hours I did).

Once cool, I poured the mixture into a bowl with a spout to make adding it to the ice cream maker later a bit easier - I strained out the lemon zest pieces at that point.

Stir in the lemon juice/triple sec, the 2 cups of cream (I think this could be light cream, half and half, or even just more whole milk potentially, I plan to experiment with this more) and the vanilla and lemon extracts (1 tsp of vanilla, 1/8 tsp of lemon only).

Cover and refrigerate until very cold (or else your ice cream maker insert won't have enough cooling power to freeze it all the way). Freeze according to your particular ice cream maker's instructions, and then transfer to a container and put in the freezer for a couple of hours before serving.

Unfortunately, we somehow ate all of this gelato before I managed to take a pretty picture of some of it in a bowl or cone.  I will make more very soon so we can get a picture, just for the sake of thoroughness, of course.

*when I made mine I had only 3 lemons, which produce about 1/3 cup of juice. I had Jenean's bottle of key lime juice in my fridge, so I topped the lemon juice off with key lime juice up to 1/2 cup, and then added triple sec up to 2/3 cup.