artisanal ice cream

how to reconise an artisanal ice cream and please tell me the difference between homemade and the industrial produced ice cream?

If you're paying more than 3 bucks for a single cone, it's artisanal all right.

Seriously, the general difference seems to be that homemade is made from a relatively limited set of ingredients, generally cream, sugar, flavorings/additions, and a simple stabilizer like egg. Plus it's made in a dasher-style freezer that doesn't whip in all that much air.

Grocery store ice cream generally has a much longer list of stabilizers and is made in a continuous freezer that whips in more air. The new "double churned" or "extra churned" lite products seem to have even more air - check the grams per serving and servings per container.

I know that some commercial producers of Ice Cream use sea weed as a stabilizer {or filler?} When I worked the docks many years ago we shiped containers of sea weed from S.E. Asia to a large Ice Cream producer. Now that I understand that sea weed has many health benifits it just makes my rare indulgences of the sweet confection all that much sweeter. Chow Jim

Yup, it's called carageenan in the ingredient list.