Peanut butter and jam ice cream

If you love peanut butter cookies, you'll love peanut butter ice cream. Mixing in jam is optional (but yummy). Mixing in chocolate would probably be just as great; I plan to test that theory soon.

The peanut butter ice cream mix was easy to make and required no cooking. You just measure out a few ingredients and then whir them up in a food processor or blender. (A blender would probably be better, since the volume is a bit much for a food processor; spillage occurred.) I bet the mix would be cold enough to churn after an hour in the fridge, but I didn't have time that night.

The next morning, I whisked the mix (it seemed to have separated a bit, with the solid stuff at the top) and then churned it for a little more than 20 minutes.

After the initial whisking, the mix was fairly liquid.

After 20 minutes, the ice cream was setting up well.

As I put the ice cream into its container, I layered it with raspberry preserves.

Adding the J to the PB

Then Nathan and I proceeded to devour what stuck to the churner, adding little bits of raspberry jam. So delicious! I'd made the ice cream to eat with friends that night, but at points during the day I obsessed about when I could taste the peanut buttery goodness again.

Interestingly, the ice cream seemed to melt very quickly. Usually whatever sticks to the churning blade doesn't turn liquid for a while, but this was liquefying and dripping off quickly. You could also see some ice cream melting in the container. I'd chilled the container, but chilling the raspberry jam might have helped avoid that melting.

The Perfect Scoop generally recommends using a non-"natural" peanut butter, since the natural ones separate, but I haven't had a problem using "natural" peanut butter for the two recipes I've tried, so far.

Trader Joe's creamy unsalted peanut butter + Bonne Maman raspberry preserves

Update (May 22)

I made some plain, no-jam peanut butter ice cream yesterday. Yet again, I made a mess. I had put less half and half in the food processor, and that was fine, but when I tried to add the rest and briefly process it... mess. Next time, I'll just pour the processed mix into a bowl and whisk in the remaining half and half.

As we suspected, this ice cream tastes great with chocolate sauce. It's not at all like a Reese's, though; it's just two flavors that complement each other. It tasted a lot like the chocolate-peanut butter ice cream recipe I made before, which was yummy. Still, next time I make the peanut butter ice cream, I might try mixing in pieces of soft chocolate (ganache?).