Currently cooking out of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

When I crave citrus to eat, it is usually grapefruit that I’m wanting. Oranges are too sweet (usually) and lemons and limes too sour. The lowly grapefruit gets it just right.

I’ve been thinking about a grapefruit frozen yogurt for some time, wondering if you could capture the sweet/tart flavor without having to cook it down to a syrup so the juice wouldn’t make the frozen yogurt icy. Well, this frozen yogurt comes close to what I had in mind, but it’s not quite there. In the book, this is a grapefruit hibiscus frozen yogurt, but I didn’t want to track down dried hibiscus flowers, so I simply left them out (you could probably use hibiscus tea, if you didn’t mind the tea flavor). The frozen yogurt uses both the grapefruit juice and the grapefruit peel.

You start out by bringing grapefruit juice and sugar (and the dried hibiscus if you are using it) to a boil to dissolve the sugar. That gets set aside while the frozen yogurt base is made. The base is simply milk, cream corn syrup and the grapefruit peel boiled together and thickened with a cornstarch slurry. The base is then whisked into cream cheese, drained low-fat yogurt and the grapefruit/sugar solution. The liquid is cooled, strained to remove the peel and churned.

The frozen yogurt is slightly bitter from the grapefruit peel, but has a pretty nice grapefruit flavor, although it isn’t as strong as I would have liked it. You can definitely taste the yogurt, and that yogurty tang almost overwhelms the grapefruit. This might be an instance where ice cream might showcase the grapefruit flavor better than yogurt (of course, a grapefruit granita would give you the cleanest, freshest grapefruit flavor, but darn it, I want dairy).

Or, I could simply do what I did after I took that picture up there. After the camera was put away, I added the rest of the grapefruit supremes and juice to the bowl with the frozen yogurt, stirred it all together and ate it. It was amazing. Tart but sweet, creamy from the melting frozen yogurt and intensely refreshing. I pretty much licked the bowl clean.