My wife and I are on low-carb diets, and we bought an ice cream maker so that we could occasionally indulge ourselves. We make ice cream using diet sweetener. The result is very tasty but there’s a problem: It’s fine when it’s first made, but after storing the leftovers in the freezer, it sets rock hard. Apparently the sugar in regular ice cream helps it stay mallable at freezer temperatures. Is there anything we can add like carrageenen or lecethin(sp) that would improve the texture?
Egg yolks are rich in lecithin, so you may want to add an extra egg yolk to your mixture. It will raise the fat content to the mixture, but should help in keeping it softer in the freezer.
Your ice cream isn’t rock hard because of the sugar, but because there isn’t as much air whipped into it as the store-bought kind. Homemade ice-cream generally takes longer to make and melts a bit too much before you can get it into the deepfreeze. Kind of like when you leave a store bought gallon on the counter too long to thaw, and the next time you go to get ice cream it’s like cement, causing you to have to unthaw it even longer, and the descent down the slippery slope accelerates.
The best way to make ice-cream at home is to make a half recipe in the same sized ice-cream freezer. With more cooling surface area, the ice-cream sets faster. Then put the extra in the freezer right away. You have to make more batches of ice-cream, but the results are more palatable.