Roasted Strawberry Rhubarb Buttermilk Ice Cream

The fact that Strawberry and Rhubarb season overlap is almost enough to make us go to church.
Serves: 4-6 with about 1 qt of Ice Cream

Roasted Strawberry Rhubarb Buttermilk Ice Cream

The fact that Strawberry and Rhubarb season overlap is almost enough to make us go to church. Kind of like how flour and water alone turn into sourdough bread, or milk plus mold will someday equal cheese; only a higher power could allow such a perfect pair to come together for our gastronomic pleasure.

If dessert were a double act, Rhubarb would be Desi to Strawberry’s Lucy, Keenan to its Kel, Harold to its Kumar, Anne Perkins to its Leslie Knope. Rhubarb, while lovable, isn’t the tastiest or most memorable part of the dish. Instead it is the acerbic foil Strawberries need to taste their best, be their sweetest, and become basically everyone’s favorite fruit.

Rhubarb is full of oxalic acid, which is poisonous in large doses but incredibly useful in smaller. It gives an astringently mouth puckering tang to lots of our favorite produce— but it’s less of a flavor and more of a sensation. What it’s really good for is balancing the hell out of stuff that super sugary. The juicy, candy sweetness of fresh strawberries turns mellow and grown-up in the presence of rhubarb, while the near bland rhubarb gets wrapped up in the strawberries’ intensely floral perfume.

While these botanical soulmates are most often found in pies, we think that they are better matched in ice cream. The dairy rounds out sharpness of the rhubarb and showcases the more complex fat-soluble flavor compounds in the berries.