Art of Homemade Ice Cream

With the upcoming holiday of "Memorial Day" honoring our soldiers, most of us celebrate the coming of summer with BBQ's and homemade ice cream.

In my opinion, making super ice cream is an art just as any cooking adventure. I am planning the menu for the BBQ which includes brisket, port butte, burgers, chicken on the grill and a smoked bird.

In addition I am working on the ice cream menu. I am having a neat group over and since I still do not have power, dessert will be home made ice cream. I will be doing strawberry ice cream with the berries out of my garden and will be doing cantelope ice cream. I use a lot of heavy cream, butter and other blood sludge material.

The cantelope ice cream is super.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

Butter????? Tell me more! I've never used butter in my ice cream nor have I ever seen it as part of a recipe. I use whatever combination of milk, cream, heavy cream, eggs that I can concoct. My most recent ice cream flavor was chestnut, made with a sweetened French chestnut paste and loads of egg yolks. Yummy.

But, tell me more about how you use the butter in it!
Lisa

quote:

Originally posted by lvw

Butter????? Tell me more! I've never used butter in my ice cream nor have I ever seen it as part of a recipe. I use whatever combination of milk, cream, heavy cream, eggs that I can concoct. My most recent ice cream flavor was chestnut, made with a sweetened French chestnut paste and loads of egg yolks. Yummy.

But, tell me more about how you use the butter in it!
Lisa

Lisa:

Homemade Ice Cream
Butter Pecan Ice Cream Recipe

Ingredients:
1 pint light cream
1 pint heavy cream
4 oz brown sugar
2 Tablespoon of butter
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1 teaspoon vannilla extract

Place the light cream, sugar and butter in a saucepan and mix over low heat. Stir until it bubbles around the edge. Remove from heat and allow to cool. When cool, pour in ice cream maker and stir in the double cream and extract. Freeze according to the ice cream makers instructions and add pecans as it begins to harden.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

Oh man does that sound good. Thanks! Y'know, I might even put candied pecans in it.

Lisa

Try this one. You can vary it as well.

Chocolate Bourbon Ice Cream

10 egg yolks
1 liter milk (not low fat!)
1 cup sugar
2/3 lb of decent chocolate in small peices
1 tbsp vanilla
quality bourbon too taste, I use about 1/2-3/4 cup

Scald milk over heat. Beat egg yolks with sugar till smooth. Add milk a little at a time to eggs whisking constantly. Put all back in a pot and over low heat, stir with a wooden spoon. Stir until mixture coats the back of the spoon like really thick cream. Remove rom heat and strain into a bowl. Whisk in chocolate while still hot causing it to melt. Then vanilla and bourbon. Freeze as to instructions on your machine.

We serve this with coconut-banana cream pie when entertaining our good ol friends and clients from southern ports.

Wishing all a Happy Memorial Day

quote:

Originally posted by lvw

Oh man does that sound good. Thanks! Y'know, I might even put candied pecans in it.

Lisa

Lisa, you can candy them if you wish, but what you might consider is toasting them with butter and salt and after they get toasty brown, crunch them up and add to the ice cream. The slightly salty taste along with the butter will enhance your ice cream.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

Lisa, if you use candied pecans, you might want to reduce the sugar slightly in the base recipe, or it may not freeze solidly enough. I like to add a tablespoon or 2 of liquor (vanilla vodka, or a liqueur that matches the main flavor of the base). It accentuates the underlying flavor and keeps the ice cream from freezing rock hard.
JaneDough

Dreyers/Edys Dreamery brand, when launched, included an ice cream with what I recall as garlic/cayenne-glazed nuts, but may have been merely caramelized-cayenne. Surrounded with a lightly sweet ice cream, that remains the best "big brand" ice cream I have ever tasted. Perhaps it's worth a try at home...

Eric

quote:

Originally posted by Sundancer7


The cantelope ice cream is super.

Sundancer, I've been gone a few days and just saw your post. Would you give us the recipe for your cantelope ice cream? That sounds great.

Also, I'm really glad to hear your power is back on!!

quote:

Originally posted by Bushie

quote:

Originally posted by Sundancer7


The cantelope ice cream is super.

Sundancer, I've been gone a few days and just saw your post. Would you give us the recipe for your cantelope ice cream? That sounds great.

Also, I'm really glad to hear your power is back on!!

Tennessee Cantaloupe Ice Cream

Ingredients:
1: 1 Very ripe Cantaloupe
2: 2 tablespoons lemon juice
3: 2 eggs
4: 3/4 cup sygar
5: 2 cups heavy cream
6: 1 cup of milk


Cut the cantaloupe in half, spoon out the seeds, scoop out the ripe fruit, add the lemon juice and purree.

Drain the juice in another bowl and reserve. Cover the melon puree and refrigerate. Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy which I do in about 2 minutes. Whisk in the sugar a little at a time and then continue to whisk until completely blended. Pour in the cream and milk and continue to whisk.

Transfer the mixture into an ice cream maker and follow mfg's instuctions.

After the ice cream begins to stiffen, add the cantaloupe puree. If juice has accumulated, drain it as it will dilute the ice cream.

Continue to crank until ice cream is firm.

I use the reserve juice on the hard ice cream. Adds a little better flavor. I accidentally spilled some of Lynchburg's finest into the mixture one time. Not a part of my recipe, but it turned out fine

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

Thank you, Sundancer! I'll be trying this one soon!

Oh Roadfoodies: I seek wisdom.

My wife, Vickie, and I have been kicking around the idea of getting an ice-cream freezer for a few years. The idea was resurrected over the weekend by Alton Brown's "Good Eats" show on sorbets, ices, and ice cream.

The venerable White Mountain freezer seems to be the Gold Standard of the breed; Brown says hand-crank only, because the motor can't sense when to crank faster and harder. He also recommended the Krups.

Cooks Illustratated recommended either the Krups (larger capacity) or Cuisinart (easier cleaning/use) a couple of years back.

Nobody has mentioned the Donvier or any other that I've seen.

My question: What model do you like the best, and why?

To dredge up a topic again.

In what may be the highlight of my thrift-storing life, I stopped into a Value Village after a client visit, and found, among the small electrics, a Bialetti gelato machine. The kind that just sits on the counter, requiring no ice, no salt and no pre-freezing of a cylinder - it's got its own compressor and everything. They're hideously expensive in the real world, but when you get a thrift store that doesn't know what it's got, they're all of a whopping $9.99. *shakes head*

What I'm curious about is if any of the people who make a lot of homemade ice cream have had any luck keeping a few bases (sweet cream, chocolate, etc) in the fridge and ready to freeze at a moment's notice.

Eric, Who Will Weigh 900 Lbs By The End Of The Summer

Oh Wow!! a virgin post!! Howdy folks---tiki here--ex of california-and now a recent Okie who is about to start making a living on the road--selling Blues CDs at festivals--so I hope to visit as many spots of thisn site as possible. On the subject of ice cream and makers---dont forget that machine makes more then desserts ----try putting your favorite gazpacho recipe in it and make an ice---i like it garnished with a half dozen jumbo shrimp/prawns that i marinate in Pernod and grill just long enough to stop them from being raw!! Awesome dinner operner on a hot summer evening.

I was just thinking about the seawater granita that La Folie in SF serves on top of oysters....

Eric, Who Has A Double-Vanilla Base Chilling At The Moment.

Speaking of ice cream makers: just at my local Costco tonight. They had the little Cuisinart ice cream maker (1 1/2 qts.) for 40 bucks! AND it came with an ice cream scoop and four diner-ish ice cream dishes.

Oh yeah, I bought one. And I will be trying out the Sundancer's and rumbelly's recipes very soon.

And it sure is nice to have a pastry chef lurking on the boards! Thanks for the tip JaneDough!!

You guys rock!

Meowzart

Anybody make banana ice cream?

What recipe works well?

Reading the current posts re whipping cream & whipped cream under the Reddi-Wip topic and then seeing this homemade ice cream topic reminds me of the best ice cream I ever ate in my life. During first two years of college my roommate's home was only 35 mi. away. He came from a large family which as a sideline owned & operated a small dairy providing local customers with non-homogenized, non-pasteurized milk in the old fashioned glass milk bottles with the cardboard tops (can't remember name of those). Back in those days local sale of non-pasteurized milk was still legal. A group of us would often go to his home on warm weather Saturdays or Sundays, and those afternoons the boys would go out to the milk cooler, get and pour off the cream from a number of left-over quarts of milk, pour out the remaining milk to the various farm animals, and bring the cream into the girls who would then cook the custard for the ice cream using this 100 per cent (or virtually 100 per cent) pure cream. All the guys would then get out on the back porch and freeze the ice cream, using old fashioned hand-crank freezers. Most frequently made flavors were vanilla, peach, and banana. Being made from that much pure cream and being made & cooked by folks who knew what they were doing, and then being hand cranked frozen, that was absolutely the best ice cream I have ever eaten in my life. No other homemade, no commercial ice cream (no matter how premium) that I've ever eaten has ever come close to equaling the quality of this ice cream. Don't mean to be insensitive or offensive with the following comment, but the story isn't complete without telling that with being so rich, if I overate to any degree on this ice cream, I would not get sick and throw up, but rather would have to go out back behind the barn and let it literally just flow back up and out (just as castor oil used to do when my parents would force a castor oil-soda-lemon juice mixture down me for severe colds and flu). That cream was just so rich that if too much of it went down, it wouldn't stay down, but would just flow back up. Learned soon to control eating of it. Was that ice cream delicious! Have never had any other ice cream so wonderful!

Joey:

I just made a batch of this, and it was excellent:

Roasted Banana Ice Cream: http://vistaverde.com/recipe_banana.htm

I omit the egg whites. There's really no point to them, just using a total of 10 yolks.

Eric

Has anyone tried to make grape ice cream? I made some using a can of Welch's condensed grape juice (you know, the kind that you would normally mix with water), but it was too icy. Any ideas?

This is my first post here, so if the question has already been asked and answered, please direct me.

I have been making ice cream and sorbet on my electric maker for the last year, and have found that freezing the batch for about two hours gives it the right hardness and consistency. This seems to be the case with cream or milk based mixes as well as sorbets. At times, however, I can't time it so I can have make a batch and freeze it for just two hours. And, everytime I freeze it for over 3 hours or so, regardless of the ingredients, it winds up rock hard. Is there no way to avoid this? Am I stuck with timing the mix a couple hours before serving, or not serving it at all?

Any suggestions or comments are appreciated. Thanks--

quote:

Originally posted by lvw
My most recent ice cream flavor was chestnut, made with a sweetened French chestnut paste and loads of egg yolks. Yummy.

Please post/send me instructions for making chestnut ice cream.