Avocado Ice Cream

There's a moment of cognitive dissonance when you first encounter avocado ice cream. The brain insists that avocados belong in salads and on toast, not in desserts. But the avocado is, botanically speaking, a fruit—a berry, in fact—and its extraordinarily high fat content makes it a natural candidate for frozen desserts. The Aztecs were pureeing avocados with sugar long before ice cream machines existed, and they were onto something. Jamie Oliver, whose enthusiasm for avocado borders on the evangelical, deserves credit for popularizing this recipe in the English-speaking world. The technique is straightforward: a citrus syrup infused with vanilla provides the sweet component, and the avocado flesh provides the fat that would normally come from cream. What you get is an ice cream of almost startling color—pale green verging on chartreuse—with a silkiness that rivals anything made with dairy. The critical variable is avocado ripeness. Underripe avocados produce grainy ice cream with an unpleasant vegetal note. Overripe avocados taste of nothing. You want avocados that yield gently to pressure but spring back—the texture of a properly aged cheese. The rest is simply a matter of patience and, ideally, an ice cream maker.