It’s your favorite summer pie… in ice cream form! Blueberry Pie Ice Cream is the ultimate summer treat. A creamy vanilla ice cream base paired with homemade blueberry pie filling and graham cracker crumbs — it’s the best kind of dessert mashup.
Do you love ice cream? Of course you do. And if you love ice cream enough to have your own ice cream maker — well — I have the ultimate treat for you!
The best parts of summer are obviously ice cream and fresh summer produce. And how better to combine the two than with blueberry ice cream?
Wait, scratch that. How do you make blueberry ice cream even better? You make blueberry pie ice cream.
That’s right. My all-time favorite dessert — in ice cream form.
Ice cream consists of six basic components: ice crystals, fat, sweeteners, air, “other solids,” and a bonus component: emulsifiers.
Let’s do a quick breakdown of each (hello, kitchen chemistry!), because understanding how ice cream works helps us make even better ice cream!
Let’s talk a little bit more about these emulsifiers, and why egg yolk plays such a huge role in the best ice cream texture!
Kitchen Chemistry
As an emulsifier, egg yolks bind together all the components of ice cream, combining together the ice, fat, sugar, air, and other solids in ice cream to create a thicker, creamier consistency. Furthermore, the lecithin in egg yolks improves the stability of ice cream, delaying the melting and keeping it in a frozen state for longer, which also reduces the thaw-freeze cycles that result in an icy texture.
Now we’re ready to start making ice cream!
First we make the liquid base — this is where we mix together our liquids (milk and heavy cream), eggs, salt, and vanilla.
To do this, we use a process called tempering to ensure we don’t overcook the egg yolks (no one wants scrambled egg ice cream!).
We’ll start by heating the milk until steaming, and then whisk just a little of this milk mixture in with the eggs and sugar. The sugar helps protect the egg yolks, and using just a little hot milk lowers the overall temperature of the eggs slowly enough that they won’t start to curdle.
This tempered egg mixture will then get poured back into the rest of the hot milk mixture, while whisking constantly, to slowly bring the egg yolks up to a high enough temperature.
Next we need to chill this heated base – and then churn away, so go ahead and get your ice cream makers ready!
There are two major types of home ice cream makers (and I’ve had both) — the kind where you freeze a bowl solid and attach it to your stand mixer, and the kind with a compressor that cools for you.
Both work just fine — but you’ll want to make sure your base is as cold as possible if you’re starting with a frozen bowl.
During the churning process, the liquid base is frozen, while air is continuously whipped in to lighten the base.
Towards the end of the churning process, we’ll add our “other solids” that take this from plain ice cream to blueberry pie ice cream.
Now that we’ve covered the general basics of ice cream making, let’s talk about this ice cream!
Instead of flavoring the entire ice cream with blueberries, we’re using our (homemade!) blueberry pie filling and graham crackers as a mix-in.
A smooth, sweet vanilla custard base. Fresh blueberries, cooked down with some sugar and cornstarch, just like you would for a blueberry pie. A thick layer of crumbled graham crackers.
Assemble in layers, and each scoop of ice cream has the perfect balance of vanilla ice cream, blueberry pie filling, and graham cracker crumble. Ice cream perfection.
No, seriously. It doesn’t get much better than this, people. Unless you ate a scoop of this blueberry pie ice cream… on top of a slice of blueberry pie. Can you even handle it? (Yes. Yes, you can.)
It’s your favorite summer pie… in ice cream form! Blueberry pie ice cream is the ultimate summer treat.
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