The strawberries have been calling to us. Yesterday at the Donaumarkt we heeded their summons. We picked up a kilo (2 × 500 g Schalen, which I guess are about a pint each).
It’s been so dang hot around here lately that we only wanted to do something cool with them. Having had such great results with homemade chocolate ice cream and a few other varieties so far, we tried our luck with homemade strawberry frozen yogurt. Big benefit here: it all happens at room temperature or cooler. Not an ice cream = no custard = no cooking! (And it was the logical next step after loving David Lebovitz’ chocolate and vanilla varieties).
We followed his recipe pretty directly, opting for the Greek-style yogurt and vodka ingredients.
500 g (just a little over a pound) strawberries, rinsed, hulled, and sliced
2/3 cup (130g) sugar
2 teaspoons vodka
1 cup (240 g) Greek-style yogurt
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
Then pulse that mixture with the yogurt and lemon juice in a blender until smooth and freeze it in your ice cream maker. The vodka (the original recipe suggests Kirsch, which also sounds nice) is supposed to help keep the mixture from freezing into a brick. 
Four hours of freezing later, ours came out great. I couldn’t taste the vodka, but it sure was a dream to scoop. I can’t imagine we’ll be making any regular ice cream with fruit flavors anymore the rest of the summer — not having to turn on the stove is a real bonus. And maybe the yogurt is better for us than the custard too.
Hmmm… sounds delightful. We’ve always got gin around the house, no vodka, so I’ll try it with that!
Yeah, for two teaspoons per quart, I can’t imagine it makes much difference which strong, clear, spirits you use: vodka, Kirsch, or gin.
Whoops – just read more closely. You need an ice cream maker for this? Oy. Oh well, scratch that!
Yeah, I recommend one. I like that ours is an attachment to our mixer and therefore not Yet Another Stand-Alone Piece of Equipment (YASAPE).
Otherwise you’ve got to fall back to the old fashioned method of rolling your batter around in a container inside a paint can lined with ice and rock salt. Or doing a lot of freeze-stir-freeze-stir-freeze-stir cycles, as described here — that’s the same guy who wrote the strawberry frozen yogurt recipe and he even recommends that specific recipe if you’re going to go low-tech and skip the machine.
If you don’t mind stirring the stuff every 30 minutes for 2-3 hours, maybe that’s an OK way to go, too.
HuffPo has put together a description of the various methods at your disposal here: http://slicken.it/vq