Watermelon Ice

Pure, cool, lazy

Issue 43: From Sara Kate

Enough with this heat! Here in Brooklyn, it finally broke yesterday, but not before two-weeks straight of torturous intense temps without a drop of rain which had me feeling more and more lazy each day. Coping mechanisms got into the frozen-towel and head-under-the-hose zone. There definitely wasn’t a lot of stovetop cooking, not even for the sake of ice cream. 

One night when I felt I hit a new low, I found chunks of frozen watermelon I’d stashed in the freezer a few weeks before and threw them in the food processor with a bunch of lime juice and a tiny pinch of salt. It reminded me of the three-ingredient ice cream I wrote about ten [gasp] years ago on TheKitchn.com which came on the heels of the “viral” one-ingredient ice cream Faith Durand and I had in our cookbook The Kitchn Cookbook. (To be fair “one ingredient ice cream”—spoiler: it’s banana—is an age-old trick, but our typing it out and getting it on the internet was an early move in the age of “viral” recipes.) These recipes pushed the limits of simplicity and purity. They were a joy to write and a delight to consume.