I’d like to do it - maybe make 4 quarts at a time. So…
Can you recommend a machine. Maybe middle priced or lower.
I’ve never had home made ice cream. Is good home made better than store bought?
Are excellent recipes available? Can I make the kinds I like - butter crunch, butter pecan, coffee, maple walnut - besides chocolate and vanilla?
When I was a kid and got a vanilla cone at Jimmie’s on Chestnut Street, I could taste the vanilla. It was glorious. Not so these days. Could it be taste buds dullened by age?
Do you have recipes to share?
Hmmm. There ain’t no such word as dullened, I just found out. But I’m leaving it in.
With a modern ice cream maker, it’s dead easy. The base recipe can be just cream and milk in the desired ratio, sugar and vanilla. Turn the machine on and 10 minutes later you’ve got ice cream. Or a simple custard base with eggs. Or just pour in fresh fruit juice for sorbet.
Don’t bother getting an old style ice and salt type machine. The simplest ones are just a cylinder you stick in the freezer, a little motor to turn the cylinder, and a dasher. There are lots of models and they aren’t expensive.
There are billions of recipes. As for the taste, it’s a matter of, well, taste. But yeah, it can be a lot better. And you can customize your base recipe to your particular tastes. Want it more vanilla, and you can add 4 tablespoons of vanilla instead of that wimpy 1 tablespoon the recipe calls for.
Good homemade ice cream is better, way better, indescribably better than store bought. cwPartner and I have an ice cream maker and it’s one of our favorite toys.
You can make darn near any flavor you can dream up. You’ll have to keep in mind some basics of chemistry - alcohol makes a good antifreeze and it will keep your ice cream from freezing. Too much sugar will also keep your ice cream from freezing.
I like to use a custard base for ice cream. I’ll check on the specifics, but typically we use 1 pint of half-and-half, 2 or 3 egg yolks, and enough sugar to make it as sweet as you want. This makes and ice cream that is silky smooth, and melts cleanly on the tongue.
We have a low-end Cuisinart ice cream maker. It has a tub that you chill for several hours before making the ice cream. The tub then sits on a motorized base. The base turns the tub, pulling a paddle through the ice cream. I think it cost us about $100 and it makes about a quart of ice cream per batch.
Whichever brand you buy, get one with a motor. Cranking ice cream by hand is boring, and it’s hard to keep your speed up. Also get one with a tub you can freeze. The salt/ice thing works, but it’s a nuisance.
There are basically three types of ice cream makers:
-Ones that use ice and rock salt,
-Ones that require you to freeze a cylinder or bowl, or
-Ones that have their own compressor
The ice/rock salt makers have an advantage in that you can keep making ice cream as long as the ice and salt hold out. And as long as you can crank by hand, unless you get one with a motor.
The frozen cylinder types are a good tradeoff between cost and labor, but once the cylinder is warmed by the mix, you are out of luck until you can refreeze it. People avoid this by having a second cylinder, and by putting the mix into the fridge to keep the cylinder from thawing too quickly.
The ones with a compressor can make ice cream all day and all night, and you pay for that luxury. I have a Lello, and it’s performed like a champ. I’ve made ice cream, custards and sorbets.
Ice cream/sorbet making has two steps. The first takes place in the ice cream maker, and keeps the mix in motion while it freezes. This avoids that graininess or sheets of ice that you would get if you just popped it into the freezer. When you take it out of the maker it is still a bit soft, so the second step is to put it into the freezer for a few hours to harden it.
The advantages? You get to pick the ingredients. You can pick fresh fruit or berries in the afternoon, and have them in ice cream that night.
Should you take the leap (and I heartily recommend it, as the proud owner of a hard-working Donvier hand-crank doohickey that churned out several wonderful concoctions over the summer) you MUST buy The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz.
Just trust me on this - once you’ve tried a Lebovitz recipe, you’ll never eat store-bought again. He does a fantastic job of demystifying the whole ice cream thing, which is quite wonderful if you want to know more.
I use the low-end Cuisinart ice cream maker, too. I bought a second bowl so I can make two flavors within the hour. I have to limit my sugar and the older I get the more some of the fake sugars (like isomalt) give me gastric trouble. Homemade icecream lets me adjust the proportions. I haven’t used any sugar at all–just berries, stevia, and sometimes a little Splenda with milk and half and half. I have a new jar of cardamom powder and I’d like to make a cardamom and fruit recipe soon.
I’ve got one that attaches to my Kitchenaid stand mixer, and we use it all the time–homemade ice cream is a real treat.
It was a wedding gift that came accompanied by the Ben and Jerry’s book!
One of my favorites is maple/walnut made with real maple syrup… mmm!
When adding sugar to the eggs for custard, go -v e r y s l o w l y-. Most recipes call for adding half the cream mixture to the custard. Do this very slowly, as well, to avoid overwhelming the eggs. When you’ve returned them, a slow heatup to 160F is better than a quick one. If using extracts, add them once the entire mixture has been transferred out of the pot and into another bowl and cooled a bit. The heat kills a lot of the good things about extracts and essential oils.
Don’t use highly processed sugars. Spend the extra cash on turbinado sugar (it’s still cheap, though!) and your taste buds will love you. Be sure to use something that has a small crystal size, like Florida Crystals organic cane sugar (sold in Wal*Mart, even). Stay away from Sugar in the Raw when you need sugar evenly distributed (its large crystals don’t dissolve readily).
I must have this recipe.
To tell the truth, I’ve found Alton Brown’s recipe to be the most reliably good. He makes it like I like it. Recipe is found here. Save those egg whites! You can make healthy omelets or any number of great desserts.
I’m torn on what berry will go into my next ice cream. I’ve never cooked with them. Should I use frozen, or freeze fresh berries? I’m thinking Lemon Raspberry or Lemon Blueberry. Suggestions?
I just use the Ben and Jerry’s basic sweet cream base which is, if I recall, two large eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, two cups heavy cream, one cup whole milk or half-and-half, but reducing the sugar to 1/4c turbinado and substituting real maple syrup for the rest.
Whisk the eggs first, slowly add the sugar, then syrup, cream, and milk in that order, chill down, and pour into your running ice cream freezer.
I use darker, lower grade B or C syrup for a serious, maple-y flavor and darker finished color. Throw in some very coarsely chopped walnuts when the base is half-set and you’re good to go.
Yum, yum.
ETA: I imagine you can rig your own recipe by substituting part of the sugar in whatever base you normally use, though I expect it wouldn’t be quite right with a cooked custard base.
The last couple of times that I’ve made ice cream on the spot it’s been using liquid nitrogen. Admittedly this is something that you need to handle carefully and you have to know where to get it (my dad works in a field that enabled me to borrow a big dewar full of the stuff), but it makes wonderful ice cream very quickly and it’s quite a show since you get clouds of fog everywhere.
Plain vanilla was simple - container of half & half, some plain white sugar and a little vanilla extract. I also made chocolate chip by dumping in some semisweet bits (the mini chips worked better, I found).
Metal container for mixing, wood spoon for stirring. Do not use anything glass! Wear gloves and splash protection for your face (LN is really, really cold). Put any ice cream base into the metal container (I used a clean stockpot), then begin pouring in the LN while somebody stirs continuously. Within a couple of minutes it’s done. That’s all it takes, the LN freezes the base and as the LN evaporates it boils jillions of tiny nitrogen bubbles through the ice cream (getting all those bubbles is what the stirring of a regular ice cream machine does).
For Christmas we got ourselves a Williams-Sonoma ice cream maker. We’ve never tried any other ice cream makers (or Williams-Sonoma products, for that matter), but from what I’ve seen it works well, and it’s not that expensive ($60). It’s great because you can at least make sure there are no preservatives in your food, and you can experiment, fun.
I post all my successful recipe experiments on my livejournal, but make no attempt to separate the recipes from my regular posts so I hesitate to link it. Here’re the recipes for rice ice cream and mexican chocolate ice cream (the best of our experiments so far), though.
The ‘etc’ below refers to your particular ice cream maker’s instructions.
Rice ice cream:
1 cup-ish cooked rice (books and websites are usually specific about the type, but we used our regular glutey yummy asian rice and it was fine.)
2 cups milk
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon fennel seed
Heat rice, milk, sugar over medium till simmering (and stir sugar till dissolved). Lower heat and simmer 30 minutes till it becomes porridgelike. Stir often during simmer to prevent clumping/sticking. afterwards, beat hot porridge into eggs in a large mixing bowl. Cool slightly, then add cream, vanilla and fennel. Chill.
Then pour into maker, etc.
Mexican Chocolate ice cream:
3-4 disks Mexican chocolate (we used Abuelita)
1 tbsp. vanilla (or 1/2 a vanilla bean)
3 eggs
3 3/4 cups half-and-half
1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt
Chop up chocolate, heat with half n’ half and vanilla till boiling while whisking, beat eggs with salt, remove chocolate from heat and whisk slowly into eggs, cook (new pot) into custard till it reaches 170-175 degrees F, strain into a metal bowl and cool over ice, stirring occasionally, then pour into ice cream maker, etc.
I have the Kitchenaid add-on. I love making my own ice cream; I can make it exactly the way I like it (for “standard” flavors), or I can make something unusual to pair with another dessert item (I once made honey-lavender ice cream and served a scoop of it on top of peanut-butter-and-banana bread).
Tip: Pre-freeze the berries or fruit pieces before adding them to the half-mixed ice cream, to prevent the mixing action from mashing them to pulp. Unless you like mashed fruity swirls, of course.
I have a low-end Cuisinart ice cream maker (the kind with the tub you freeze). Its very easy to use and I’ve had great results (I also use the ben & Jerry’s ice cream book). A couple comments.
It takes 12-24 hours to freeze the bowl, so its not really an impulsive act unless you have the space to keep the bowl frozen at all times.
There isn’t a huge cost savings over buying superpremium ice cream such as Ben & Jerry’s, mainly because heavy cream is fairly expensive as are flavor extracts, vanilla beans and such.
It comes out of the machine at soft-serve consistency; if you want scooping texture you have to temper it in the freezer for a while. I think an hour. Its all explained in the instruction booklet.
Chocolate takes longer to make than vanilla because melted chocolate gets the mix warm and then you have to get the mixture cold again.
My best ever flavor invention was “chocolate chocolate chocolate mint mint mint”: Chocolate-mint ice cream with crushed Thin Mint cookies and chopped Andes candies.
The same machine can be used to make frozen pina coladas, etc. Fun!
Homemade ice cream is cheap, easy to make, and tastes much better than store-bought.
The downside of the frozen cylinder models is having to plan ahead to freeze the cylinder (and make room for it in the freezer if that’s an issue). I prefer the traditional ice and salt models. (I’d love a compressor model but they’re expensive.)
One piece of advice I’d offer that hasn’t already been made is to remember that ice cream is frozen cream with air whipped into it - don’t fill up your canister because it will overflow. Another piece of advice is that if you’re going to add things like oreo cookies or fruit, you should freeze them seperately before you add them. Otherwise they often get pulverized by the mixer - the taste will be okay but you’ll lose the texture.
eta: I see Cervaise already mentioned the pre-freezing thing.
