Pine Nut Ice Cream Recipe (2024)

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As I headed out on my cross-country tour for my first book, I made a pact with myself to stop at as many non-corporate diners, truck stops and restaurants as I could. That’s how I found myself at a non-descript truck stop somewhere in the Sonoran Desert on the east side of Arizona.

No one else was inside, save for a bored clerk watching daytime television with one eye, and me with the other. I expected to find a few local specialties, and maybe even some of the pinon pine nuts so famous in the region. I was not disappointed: I found locally made jerky and sausages, lots of dried fruits, and some honey.

But no pine nuts; too early in the season, the clerk told me. I stocked up for the road, and lemme tell ya those fresh dates and antelope jerky hit the spot all the way to Austin.

I also bought a quart of dark desert wildflower honey. To idea of saving the ephemeral treasure of a desert in bloom seemed magical, and the aroma of the honey hit me like a silken fist. From time to time on my journey I would just open the jar and inhale.

I never did find any roadside pine nuts on my trip. But I do know where to harvestreal, American pine nuts — on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. Pinus monophyllaare large, and they crack easily.

American pine nuts are vastly superior to any other variety, with the possible exception of Italian stone pine nuts. Neither variety will give you that horrible “pine mouth,” which you get when some unscrupulous Chinese manufacturer taints Korean pine nuts with some other Asiatic pine nut that causes pine mouth. Pine mouth, incidentally, will make everything taste metallic for days.

Somewhere along my endless book tour the kernel of an idea lodged in my mind: Pine nut ice cream, sweetened with this desert honey.

My first crack at this ice cream failed, I should tell you. For whatever reason I only added about 1/3 of a cup of honey and only 2 egg yolks. The ice cream turned out icy. So I let it melt, heated it up again and added more honey and egg yolks, then rechurned it. Yes folks, if you did not know you can rechurn ice cream, now you know. Thought I might pass that bit of knowledge on.

We ate the ice cream for Christmas dinner, and it was smooth, very rich and pleasantly sweet without being cloying. The pine nuts, which can be a little soft at room temperature, harden up in the ice cream and provide a nice crunch. I used the last of my desert honey to make this ice cream, and now it’s gone. I’ll hold the memory of it inside until I hit the road again.

And given the life I live, that won’t be long.

If you’re looking for something to serve with this, you could do worse than olive oil rosemary cake.

(If you happen to live in California’s Central Valley, you can also use the nuts from the local gray or bull pines. Here’s how to harvest bull pine nuts.)