Paletas! Or Ice Pops! Or Popsicles... or...

Before the summer is completely over (why does it fly by so terribly fast?), I wanted to share a couple of easy and delicious ice pop recipes I've made lately.  There are a dizzying variety of names for these frozen treats the world over - more even than I knew!  Wikipedia tells me the name popsicle is a US/Canada thing (in addition to being a Kleenex/facial tissue thing, since Popsicle is a tm branded product name too).  I know they're called paletas in Mexico (growing up in Los Angeles we saw/ate as many of those as popsicles, I'd say), and I've been making as many recipes as I can manage from this amazing cookbook Paletas by Fany Gerson, which I highly recommend you run out and get asap.  But there are more names for these delicious treats just in English:

freeze pop - Ireland
ice lolly - UK and Ireland
ice block - some parts of Australia
ice pop/freezer pop - US
icy pole (!) - New Zealand

What they are, no matter what you call them, is cooling, refreshing, and absurdly easy to make at home.  Pretty much any liquid from thin to thick that you enjoy consuming as a liquid can be frozen into a pop mold and become a completely awesome snack on a hot day.  Here in the Northeast we had 2 solid weeks of close to 100 degree temperatures in early July, and Axel F and I ate a popsicle a day, easy.  Everyone that came over had one too.  August has been pretty mild so far, so I though I enjoy the temperance, I am hoping for at least one more summer heat wave so we can gorge on popsicles/paletas/ice pops once again.

I'm sharing two super easy recipes today, but as I said, whatever you like in liquid form will probably make a delicious pop (fruit juice, lemonade, smoothies, chopped or pureed whole fruit, pudding, flavored yogurt, even bloody mary mix!) - my only advice there is to make sure it's sweeter unfrozen than you want it to be when you're eating it frozen - the cold temperature dulls the sweetness a surprising amount.

And finally, you can get popsicle molds just about anywhere (any size and shape!) these days, but I really like this type a lot, which makes 10 at a time.  I usually take the time to unmold all 10 once they're fully frozen, and wrap each one in its own little coat of plastic wrap, so it's quick and easy to grab and eat one!

Coconut Paletas
adapted from Paletas: Authentic Recipes for Mexican Ice Pops, Shaved Ice & Aguas Frescas by Fany Gerson

1 15.5 oz can coconut milk (full fat is better than light, though light is ok)
1 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk
milk or half-and-half (I use milk very happily but of course half-and-half will be richer)
pinch of salt (optional - I forgot this last time and didn't miss it)
1/4 tsp vanilla extract (also optional - also forgot and didn't miss it)

In a 4 cup measuring cup, combine the sweetened condensed milk and half the can of coconut milk and mix thoroughly so that it's the same consistency throughout.  Add the remaining coconut milk and top off with as much milk or half-and-half needed to make a full 4 cups.  Add salt and vanilla if you want.  Stir or gently whisk to combine - encourage the sweetened condensed milk to dissolve into the rest.  Check the bottom to see if you have any sticky sweetened condensed milk lagging behind.

Pour into molds, filling almost to the top but not all the way, and freeze about 5 hours, until solid.  If you use the kind of pop molds with built in sticks (like these) you can put those right in from the start.  If you use the kind I linked to before (the kind I use), you should let the pops freeze about an hour before you stick in the wooden popsicle sticks.

Strawberry Greek Yogurt Pops

2 cups plain greek yogurt (any fat level is fine)
2 cups fresh or frozen strawberries (halfway thawed, if frozen)
sugar to taste (this will depend on your strawberries)

In a bowl, cut up the strawberries into chunks and add some sugar - anywhere from 4 tablespoons to 1/2 cup.  Using a potato masher or the back of a large spoon, mash up the strawberries with the sugar until chunky but loose and sauce-like.  Add the greek yogurt and combine thoroughly.  Taste for sweetness - if it doesn't taste very sweet to you, you'll probably want to add more sugar.  Once the pops are frozen, they will taste much less sweet than the yogurt mixture tastes now.

Spoon into molds, filling almost to the top but not all the way, and freeze about 5 hours, until solid.  If you use the kind of pop molds with built in sticks (like these) you can put those right in from the start.  If you use the kind I linked to before (the kind I use), you should let the pops freeze about an hour before you stick in the wooden popsicle sticks.

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.

strawberry gelato

So, I made this great lemon gelato, I took pictures of every step along the way to freezing it, wrote up the post right away so I wouldn't forget what I did... and then we somehow ate it all before I took a picture of a bowl of the finished gelato. So of course the only way forward is to make lemon gelato a second time, in order to get a picture, right? In the meanwhile, here is the strawberry gelato I made more recently.
I used bits from 3 recipes for this - Mario Batali's from Molto Gusto, which intriguingly uses powdered milk to counteract the water in the strawberries to keep them from turning the gelato icy; this one from Bon Appetit that I found on Epicurious, which unlike Mario's doesn't use any egg yolks, but rather thickens the base with cornstarch (skipping egg altogether lets the flavor of the fruit really stand out, and makes the gelato more refreshing, but still creamy); and Mark Bittman's general recipe for "soft fruit ice milk" in How to Cook Everything, (I got it as an app on my iphone, best 5 bucks I ever spent!) which like many recipes in there makes one feel free to experiment, armed with a general guideline for proportions.

Strawberry Gelato
makes about a quart

2 cups hulled and chopped strawberries (preferably organic)
3/4 cup sugar, divided (I used turbinado, any kind is fine)
a pinch of salt
1/3 cup dry milk powder
1 cup heavy cream
1 1/4 cups milk
1 tbsp cornstarch
1 1/2 tbsp alcohol of some kind (I used creme de cacao, you could use a slightly smaller amount of vodka)
2 tsp vanilla extract

In a bowl or large (4 cup or greater) measuring cup, combine the chopped strawberries and their juices with 1/4 cup of the sugar and the pinch of salt. Cover and let sit in the fridge for a while to macerate.

Add the dry milk powder to the macerated strawberries along with the cup of cream, cover and return to the fridge.

In a medium saucepan, combine the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar and the tablespoon of cornstarch. Add 1/4 cup of milk to start, whisking to get rid of any lumps. Add the remaining cup of milk, and over medium heat, bring to a boil, and once bubbling, let it simmer over medium low heat for 1 minute (stir pretty constantly throughout this process).

Remove the milk/cornstarch mixture from the heat and cool it down (either put the bottom of the pan in an ice bath, or if you don't mind getting another bowl dirty, scrape it into a metal bowl, and put that in an ice bath (it will cool down really quickly that way). When it's no longer hot, stir it into the strawberry/cream mixture, along with the vodka (or whatever you decide to use) and the vanilla extract.

Chill the base, ideally for several hours, or overnight if you can spare the time (it should be pretty thick, like the texture of yogurt, actually). Freeze in your ice cream maker, then transfer it to a chilled container for storing. The first day (after about 2 hours chilling in the container) the gelato is soft; the next day it's scoopable (thanks to the addition of the alcohol) but firm, so leaving it out for ten minutes before you try to scoop it makes life a bit easier.

Awesome on a sugar cone.