Home › Ice Creams and Ices › Lemon Ice
Lemon Ice
Take the juice of 4 lemons, add 3 pints of thin syrup made with about 1 pint of sugar. Into every quart, when it begins to freeze, stir the whites of 2 eggs, beaten very light with a little powdered sugar. This will make it smooth. Any kind of water ice may be made by mixing the strained juice of the fruit--currant, raspberry, strawberry, etc.--with syrup flavored to taste, and add the white of an egg when it begins to freeze.
A plain water ice of the old school: fruit juice, sugar syrup, and beaten egg white folded in as the mixture sets. The proportions are sound, but the syrup and the freezing method both need translating.
- Thin syrupPeriod "thin syrup" is loosely defined, commonly somewhere near one part sugar to three parts water by volume, boiled briefly until clear and then cooled completely. Three pints of it here would carry about 1 pint (roughly 14 oz) of sugar, which should land the finished ice somewhere around 18-20 percent sugar -- soft enough to scoop, firm enough to hold.
- YieldJuice plus syrup comes to about 3 1/3 pints, so roughly 1 3/4 to 2 quarts once churned, serving 10 to 12. Most domestic ice cream machines take a quart or a quart and a half at a time, so churn it in two batches.
- Four lemonsLemon size varies, so measure rather than count: four should give roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of juice, and strain it. Add a little grated zest to the hot syrup and strain it out when cool if the flavor seems thin.
- The egg whiteIt is a stabilizer, not an enrichment: beaten white breaks up the ice crystals and keeps the texture smooth. It goes in when the mixture has gone slushy but is not yet set, and it is never cooked. Use pasteurized whites, or leave it out and accept a slightly coarser ice.
- FreezingThe original assumes a bucket freezer turned by hand. In a modern churn, freeze until slushy, add the beaten whites through the opening, and finish. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow metal pan and stir hard with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, adding the whites at the second stir.
- The fruit variationsRaspberry and strawberry juices are much less acidic than lemon (currant rather less so, being sharp in its own right), so the same syrup can taste flat and sweet. Cut the syrup back and add lemon juice by the tablespoon until the fruit reads sharp; a berry ice wants acidity to keep from tasting like jam.
- RipeningPack the churned ice into a chilled container and hold it in the freezer an hour before serving. Straight from the machine it is too soft; after a day it will be hard and should stand 10 minutes at room temperature.