{"id":336,"date":"2009-06-24T15:42:41","date_gmt":"2009-06-24T22:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/?p=336"},"modified":"2009-06-27T15:44:22","modified_gmt":"2009-06-27T22:44:22","slug":"shuksan-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/2009\/06\/24\/shuksan-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Shuksan Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the major perks of living in Oregon is U-Pluck strawberries. The Shuksan variety, prized for its sweet flavor and diminutive stature, is above and beyond the overblown, hollow-cored variety you get shipped from California.<\/p>\n

\"Shuksan1\"<\/a> \"Shuksan2\"<\/a> \"Shuksan3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We went berry picking last week on Thursday and this week on Wednesday… it’s a lot of work to process all that fruit but it’s sure worth it. Our freezer is stuffed with bags of frozen lovelies – the Shuksan’s shape makes it easy to slice off the top and then arrange on a tray – once they’re frozen you can store them in a bag to keep on hand for smoothies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I made two different batches of fresh-strawberry ice cream. Sounds like heaven, right? The second batch was delicious, but both had texture issues. For the first one, I figured because I was adding sugar I would use the less-ripe berries. I also threw in some over-ripe ones that wouldn’t last the night. I chopped some and pureed some and chilled them with sugar and lemon juice. I strained out the juice and added that to the whole milk + half-n-half mixture that I was using, plus vanilla and a bit more sugar. I added the chopped berries near the end of the mix\/chill process in the ice cream maker, and I think that was a mistake – the ice cream was very soft. I transferred it to a tub in the freezer and took it out and stirred it periodically… but it didn’t end up all that great. A bit too tart, the chopped berries were little frozen rocks, and not creamy enough. The next day what was left had frozen into a solid mass and we had to chip away at it. For my second attempt, I decided to just puree all the berries and add them at the beginning of the mix. I also used more sugar (and a higher proportion of half-n-half) and BN sorted out the ripest berries for the puree. But, the ice cream never really thickened up. I’m not sure what happened here – perhaps the freezer bowl wasn’t frozen all the way or maybe the batch was too big. It tasted great, but was too soft at first and too hard after being in the freezer overnight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the major perks of living in Oregon is U-Pluck strawberries. The Shuksan variety, prized for its sweet flavor …<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sparkledesign.net\/fidget\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}