Dairy-free Peach & Scotch Bonnet Pepper Ice Cream

Combining a little bit of heat with sweetness and vanilla.

Equipment

1 Ice Cream Maker
1 Blender or immersion blender

Ingredients
4 large egg yolks
⅔ cups cane sugar
1 can coconut milk
1 can coconut cream
¼ teaspoon salt
1 TBSP bourbon vanilla flavoring
2TBSP + 1 oz brandy (We used Courvoisier)
1½ pounds of sliced fresh peaches (We started with 2 pounds of frozen fresh peaches, and ate about half a pound in preparation.)

Instructions
Prep your ice cream maker so that it is ready to make ice cream.

Prepare Scotch Bonnet pepper:
• Mince very, very fine.
• Soak in brandy in 2 TBSP brandy for a few days.
NB: I started with a dehydrated Scotch Bonnet pepper. I chopped it fine & rehydrated in brandy, marinating it for a week, mincing it finer after rehydrating. Next time: consider grinding dried pepper to powder & marinating the powder.)

Prepare peaches:
• If frozen, thaw.
• Stew gently in a medium saucepan over a low heat until softened.
• Divide in half. Blend half to pretty small texture. Stir in 1oz brandy.
• Cut the other half of the peaches into small pieces. (Recommended: keep stewing these until they begin to get soft.)

Prepare Custard:

• Combine egg yolks, coconut milk, sugar, and salt in a blender and process until smooth.
• Pour mixture into a medium sauce pan, and heat over medium low just until steamy. You should see little bubbles forming around the edge of the pan. Do not boil.
• Strain peppers from brandy. Stir in the finely minced, marinated pepper, reserving brandy.
• Continue to cook the coconut milk mixture until it has thickened to the consistency of a thin custard that will coat the back of a spoon. This will take longer than you expect.
• Remove the mixture from the heat and whisk in the vanilla extract, brandy from peppers & blended peaches.
• Re-blend again until smooth.

Refrigerate the mixture for 2-4 hours, or until the custard mixture is very cold.

Churn Ice Cream:
Pour cooled mixture into ice cream maker and churn until partly/largely frozen. This should take about 30-40 minutes.
When you’ve finished churning, the ice cream will have the consistency of soft serve ice cream. Pour into freezer-safe container. Make some openings in the soft ice cream and pour stewed peach pieces in to make ripples of peaches.
For soft-serve style ice cream, serve immediately. For a harder scoopable ice cream, place in the freezer for 2-3 hours.
Take out and place on the counter for 10 minutes to soften for serving.

This is actually pretty good.