My kid got this “Small World Double Dip Ice Cream Maker” for her birthday from her Granddad. We tried it out today, we’re certain we followed the very simple directions to the letter, and what we got was more of a soup or mush than an ice cream.
The recipe is:
One cup whipping cream
One cup sour cream
Seven tablespoons sugar
One tablespoon vanilla extract (we used the fake stuff)
You just mix them, and pour them into the machine.
What the machine does is mix the stuff for five minutes. It thn goes in th frezer where it goes through some cycle of mix/non-mix states for an hour to an hour and a half. It signals that it is finished by flashing a green light. At that point, there’s supposed to be ice cream inside–but instead, as I said, it was, at best, a very thin milkshake.
I tried having it go through the freezer cycle process again, but there’s no easy way to do this–upon hitting the appropriate button, it simply flashes the “finished” green light immediately. This may be triggered by temperature, and if so I may be able to get it to go again by letting the stuff completely melt. But I doubt that that is going to be conducive to creating anything like ice cream at the end.
Any idea how I might alter the above recipe to get th thing to create a more ice-cream like substance?
Not sure. But often after making ice cream in the devices that you pre-freeze, it has to be scooped out, put in an ordinary container, and left in the freezer to become ice cream. But if it’s too thin I think it will just become ice. You could also try adding some corn starch, a traditional ice cream ingredient that improves texture, and may thicken yours up enough to be workable.
BTW: Is this the freezer section of a refrigerator, or a dedicated freezer?
I would say it’s too much whipping cream to sour cream. Which, honestly, sounds absolutely disgusting anyway, so I’d try replacing the sour cream and whipping cream with actual whipped cream or whipped topping folded into some prepared instant pudding. That will be thick and creamy and should set up well, even if you have to plop it in the freezer separately for a couple hours to solidify.
Or if you’re feeling really adventurous, the filling for this chocolate cream pie make awesome chocolate custard. You need four tablespoons to really get it to set up solid as a pie, instead of the three required in the recipe, but you might want to cut it back to two if you’re putting it in an automatic ice cream maker.
The other thing is that I’ve seen recipes for making ice cream using that method, except just putting it in a bowl in the freezer and stirring it on your own every half hour or so, and the recipes usually recommend something like 4-6 hours for ice cream, rather than just 1.5.
You’re using a tablespoon of extract in two cups of liquid? That seems like a really high ratio. In addition to being too strong a flavor, it could be causing your freezing problem. Extracts contain alcohol and that can prevent freezing.
Try cutting back to a teaspoon of vanilla extract (or even a little less).
I agree with this, and with the fact that machine made ice cream needs to be tempered --let stand in the freezer for about 1/2 hour – because coming out at soft-serve consistency is the expected result from most home ice cream makers. I’m actually really surprised the instructions did not say this. Though it certainly is an unusual little device.
But if you say it was “like a thin milkshake” it was probably underfrozen possibly because of the alcohol content in the flavoring.
Two more diagnostic questions - my answer above assumes the answers are no & yes, respectively.
Did you use Fat-free sour cream? Or (gods above) Fat free cream?
Were the ingredients cold when you started?
ETA: 3. Did you use sweetened heavy cream? Sugar inhibits freezing too, and if it was pre-sweetened you had too much.
It’s not too much whipping cream. Ice cream recipes typically have all liquid, no sour cream, and the higher the percentage of high-fat cream to lower-fat other liquids, the better it will freeze, with less crystallization. Your freezer either isn’t cold enough, or, as Little Nemo suggests, there’s too much alcohol in the 2 tablespoons of vanilla. It seems like maybe the unit is registering the ice cream as being frozen before it’s really done.
Artificial vanilla extract. It’s made from manufactured vanillin rather than natural vanilla. I prefer real vanilla myself when it’s the primary flavor (given a choice, I make my vanilla ice cream with vanilla beans) but it’s not a big deal.
The recipe says “1 T Vanilla,” capital T, which means one tablespoon. Could well be a misprint, though.
We tried just letting it sit in the freezer for a long while. It took what seemed a bizarrely long amount of time given what the directions state, but eventually it did kind of set. It wasn’t really like ice cream–more like a mousse–and it didn’t taste particularly good. But kids know nothing.
That’s a lot of sour cream for an ice cream recipe. Try using 1/2 cup of sour cream and 1.5 cups of cream for it to taste more like ice cream. In general, it should be frozen into a semi-solid state before all agitation is finished, then frozen the rest of the way.
Actually half whipping cream and half sour cream is going to be a really heavy base. My usual base is a mix of heavy cream and half and half, which I can adjust depending on how heavy I want the ice cream to be. My usual ratio is five cups heavy cream to four cups half and half. Add two to two and a half cups of sugar and a tablespoon of vanilla extract (unless I use vanilla beans).
I once tried a base of all heavy cream. It came out like butter. Sweet frozen vanilla butter, so we ate it anyway.
I have read that the imitation vanilla extract is sometimes made with propylene glycol, which is anti-freeze, basically, but I don’t know if the percentage would inhibit freezing. The whole recipe seems strange. Are there any other recipes, or can you adapt a more traditional one to the volume and see if that works any better?
Propylene glycol is a form of alcohol and it does have anti-freezing capabilities.
Sometimes you’ll see people get it confused with ethylene glycol, which is the kind of alcohol used in automobile anti-freeze. But propylene glycol is non-toxic (at least in reasonable doses) while ethylene glycol is toxic.
Unequivocally, the fake vanilla extract is the problem. It contains alcohol. Auto antifreeze contains alcohol–because it lowers the freezing point. Use REAL Vanilla extract and your problem will go away.
You do realize that most real vanilla extract also contains alcohol? In fact, a lot of extracts that are labelled “non-alcohol” or “alcohol free” actually use glycerol or propylene glycol as the alcohol “substitute”. (Chemically, glycerol and propylene glycol are alcohols and they have the anti-freezing property of alcohol. But FDA regulation does not consider them alcohol for food labeling purposes.)
If you want to avoid alcohol, you’ve either got to find a non-alcoholic extract made with an oil base or use vanilla beans.