How to Make a Peach Milkshake

One of my dining highlights of 2021 was a peach milkshake from Ridgefield Ice Cream in Connecticut. I don’t expect to be in that neck of the woods again any time soon, and I had a hankering for a peach shake, so I decided to make one.

My grandfather taught me to make milkshakes at an early age. They’ve always been a big favorite of mine. But I’ve only really started to crave peach shakes in recent years. For much of my life, my fruit milkshake of choice was banana.

The simplest way to make a peach shake would be to simply mix milk and peach ice cream in a blender. I didn’t have any peach ice cream on hand, but as is generally the case, I did have a pint of vanilla ice cream. It’s the base for most of my favorite sundaes and milkshakes, so I tend to stock it in our freezer.

We also had milk and a can of sliced peaches in fruit juice. I have made banana milkshakes by blending a banana with vanilla ice cream and milk for years, so I decided to make my shake by simply substituting the canned peaches for the banana.

After draining the peaches so the fruit juice they came in wouldn’t impact the taste of the shake, I mixed them with a little milk in a regular blender.

I always prefer to make shakes in my milkshake maker rather than a regular blender. so I transferred the blended peaches and milk into a classic metal cup, added the entire pint of vanilla ice cream, and blended away.

Incidentally, Bassetts of Philadelphia has been in the ice cream business since 1861. When I lived around the corner from the city’s Reading Terminal Market, I would regularly buy pints and quarts of hand-dipped ice cream from their stand in the storied food hall. I settle for pre-packed pints from the supermarket now.

This milkshake maker was a wedding gift in 2006 from my friend Corlyss and several other people I’ve since lost touch with. It’s still going strong in spite of getting a lot of use over the years.

The finished product was excellent. It had a fairly strong peach flavor and was perhaps slightly less sweet than most milkshakes. I guess the ratio of added sugar was lower than normal because I was using actual fruit rather than sweetened syrup for flavor.

It was average on the thickness scale. I don’t think it would be possible to make an extra-thick shake with this method. The blended peaches and milk create more liquid than you have for something like a vanilla or chocolate shake, where there is only milk and perhaps a little syrup in addition to the ice cream.

I’m thinking of making a toasted marshmallow shake with actual toasted marshmallows at some point. If it happens, you’ll read about it here.