How To Make a Perfect Strawberry Milkshake (2024)

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updated May 31, 2020

summer

Creamy, thick, pale pink, just strawberry-strawberry-strawberry — all as it should be. Here's how to make your own.

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It’s hot out, so let’s get down to basics: a good old-fashioned strawberry milkshake. Why eat dinner when you can drink a shake? This is a serious strawberry milkshake, too; it isn’t messing around. It doesn’t involve anything fancy or difficult — nothing “gourmet.” This tastes like pure strawberry; not too sweet, but not too milky either. Creamy, thick, pale pink, just strawberry-strawberry-strawberry — all as it should be. Here’s how to make your own. Don’t you want a sip?

I adore a good strawberry milkshake, but I almost never drink them. They tend to be extremely disappointing. Fast-food milkshakes are fake-flavored, dyed pink, worse than bad. No, no, no. And yet homemade shakes often let me down as well. In ill-inconceived attempts to make them “healthier” people water them down with milk, or up the quotient of strawberries, until they are just sharp and icy. Now, smoothies are well and good, but when I want a milkshake, it needs to be a milkshake, OK? It’s an occasional indulgence, and therefore it needs to indulge. Got it?

I feel like I finally figured it out, my perfect strawberry shake. It’s not groundbreaking; there’s no gastronomic secrets here. But it delivers the goods. This is no fake-flavored strawberry, but it doesn’t have icy chunks of strawberry in it either. It is just totally all strawberry, all the way.

The Best Ingredients for the Perfect Strawberry Milkshake

The key, as all milkshake devotees know, is the ice cream. I like to use ice cream that doesn’t have any eggs in it; I find that the custard taste distracts from the purity of the other flavors. For this shake, I prefer the simplest Breyer’s formulation — just milk, cream, strawberries, sugar. And for the berries, you hardly need me to tell you: Get them ripe, get them fresh, make sure they are sweet as can be.

Lastly, I like to add malted milk powder, which adds just a bit of extra depth and a hint of malty flavor without turning the shake into a true malt. If you opt to use regular powdered milk, it will also add a bit of richness and creaminess. But the powders are not necessary.

Happy slurping; if you love strawberry milkshakes I hope you get to try this one soon.

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