[Photographs: Vicky Wasik]
Our one and solely purpose when growing this recipe was to create the final word strawberry popsicle: frozen fruit pops exploding with the brilliant and recent style of ripe summer season strawberries, bolstered by an underlying sweetness and concentrated taste that borders on being jammy. We examined each main methodology to get there, from macerating the berries to cooking them on the stovetop to roasting them within the oven, and the one we settled on not solely delivers essentially the most intense strawberry taste, but it surely’s additionally one of many best attainable.
The inspiration for the berry base of those popsicles got here from Max Falkowitz’s superb recipe for strawberry sorbet, which depends on a easy ratio of berries to sugar and lemon juice: for each 1 cup of recent strawberry purée, we add 1/four cup sugar together with small quantities of lemon juice and salt.
Other standard strategies we tried have been extra labor-intensive and much much less profitable. Macerating recent strawberries by mixing them with sugar and letting them sit to melt and draw out liquid led to unremarkable fruit pops with a uninteresting taste; cooking the berries on the stovetop resulted in frozen pops with an unappealing cooked taste; and roasting them within the oven yielded the iciest pops of the bunch. We even tried a few of these strategies together (like macerating after which cooking) with even worse outcomes.
But simply puréeing recent strawberries is not sufficient to supply the “ultimate” strawberry popsicle. To get there we wanted a pair extra methods. The massive one is the addition of strawberry jam: It provides a mushy, lush texture to the combo together with a deeper, sweeter fruit taste to underpin all that vibrant raw-strawberry freshness. Feel free to make use of any strawberry jam, with or with out seeds, store-bought or homemade; it’ll style nice with no matter jam you select. One might make their very own cooked-berry part, however we like store-bought jam for the effort-to-reward ratio: Just open the jar and scoop some out.
To amp up the flavour much more, we borrowed a trick from Stella and blended in freeze-dried strawberry powder, which, whereas an non-obligatory ingredient, brightens and intensifies the concentrated strawberry taste much more. Altogether, this triple whammy of recent strawberry purée, strawberry jam, and freeze-dried strawberry powder (when you determine to make use of it), yields an easy popsicle that has layers of taste and lets the strawberries actually shine.
For these questioning, this recipe works with recent or frozen strawberries. Fresh strawberries are the clear winner, however frozen will nonetheless prove very tasty pops.