Warm tinned peaches with ice cream and caramel
Hot fruit and cold ice cream, brought together with a spoon of caramel
Doubles easily in the same pan. Use a full tin of peaches and two extra scoops of ice cream.
Tinned peaches spend most of their life as a consolation prize, the fruit you reach for once fresh stone fruit is off the list. Warmed in a little butter and their own juice until the edges start to caramelise, they stop being a substitute and become the better version, glossy and soft enough to give way completely under a spoon. The trick is in the pan: let the butter and sugar cook to a proper amber before the peaches go in, swirling rather than stirring, and you get a caramel rather than a sweet syrup. Poured hot straight over cold ice cream, the whole thing starts to melt at the edges before it reaches the table, and that contrast, hot fruit against cold cream, is most of what makes this work.
Ingredients
Contains: Milk
- 15 gunsalted butter
- 20 gcaster sugar
- 200 gtinned peach slices or halves, in juice, drained, a few tablespoons of the juice reserved
- 2scoops vanilla ice cream
Method
Melt the butter in a small frying pan over a medium heat. Add the sugar and let it melt and turn amber at the edges, swirling the pan rather than stirring, for about 2 minutes.
Add the drained peach slices and turn them gently in the caramel until they are coated and warmed through, about 2 minutes.
Pour in 3 tablespoons of the reserved peach juice and let it bubble for a minute, until it turns into a light, glossy syrup that coats the peaches.
Put the ice cream in a bowl and spoon the hot peaches and syrup straight over the top, so it starts to melt at the edges as it reaches the table.
Watch-points
- Use tinned peaches in juice or syrup, never fresh. Fresh peach keeps its skin and a stone that has no place near a narrowed gut.
- Let the syrup stop bubbling before you spoon it over. Sugar syrup holds its heat far longer than it looks as though it should.
Make it more nourishing
- Add a third scoop of ice cream, for roughly another 100 kcal, and choose a full-fat tub rather than a low-fat one.
- Stir a tablespoon of double cream into the syrup at the end, off the heat, for extra richness.
- Whisk 1 tablespoon of skimmed milk powder into the reserved peach juice before it goes into the pan, for about 3 g more protein.
Swaps
- Instead of vanilla ice cream, use custard, warmed instead of chilled
- turns the dish into a fully warm pudding rather than a hot-and-cold one
- Instead of tinned peaches, use tinned pears
- works exactly the same way if peaches are not to hand