March 20, 2013
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Ice Cream Without an Ice Cream Maker
I meant to write about this awhile back and just realized today that I hadn’t yet.
So basically it all started when Candace gave us some homemade vanilla extract. Yeah, I looked it up – apparently it’s not difficult to make, literally vanilla beans in vodka. So I thought, what can I make that will use vanilla? How about, vanilla ice cream!
I basically combined this method of making ice cream without an ice cream maker with this recipe for vanilla ice cream, with a few modifications.
Ingredients:
1 c heavy cream
1/2 c half-and-half
pinch of salt
3/8 c sugar
4 tsp vanilla extract
3 egg yolksPour the heavy cream into a a large metal bowl (with a lid), add 1 tsp of vanilla extract, mix, and put that back in the refrigerator.
In a saucepan, heat the half-and-half, salt, sugar, and the rest of the vanilla extract. Stir until everything’s dissolved, then turn off the heat.
In a small bowl, stir together egg yolks.
Make your custard by adding spoonfuls of the warm half-and-half mixture into the bowl of yolks and stirring continuously. When the bowl of yolks is warmed somewhat, pour it all back into the saucepan while stirring.
Turn the heat back on to low and stir constantly, being sure to scrap the bottom of the pot once in awihle, until the custard thickens. It doesn’t really get as thick as pudding, but slightly more than a thick gravy?Take your cream out of the fridge, pour the custard into it. Stir until everything is smooth.
Loosely cap the bowl and put it in your freezer. Check on it after an hour, give it a stir if you feel so inclined. Mine didn’t really do anything until ~1.5 hours in. Then it got a bit of a crust around the side of the bowl:
Really stir that in well so that the entire mixture becomes consistent again. You’re going to do this every half hour or so.
About 3.5 hours in I got something that looked like the whole top froze over (like a lake), and then the surface cracked and more cream bubbled out.About 4.5 hours in I got something that had more of an ice cream like texture, but really wet:
An hour later it really started to look like ice cream, if a bit soft:
I gave it another stir for good measure, and then I went to bed. Checked it the next morning and it had pretty much kept its texture.
A few things of note:
- I used half and half instead of whole milk because half and half came in a smaller carton at the store, and we normally don’t drink whole milk. It made the ice cream SUPER rich and creamy though (like, after you ate it you got a slight feeling of your mouth being coated in cream), so if I did it again I would just go for the whole milk.
- The metal bowl is nice for when you’re making it, but then it’s really cold, so I ended up transferring the whole thing into a plastic bowl later so that you didn’t get frostbite when trying to scoop out ice cream to eat.
- The ice cream is HARD. It actually worked out that I transferred it into a plastic bowl because then it was sort of cut out in scoop-sized chunks and made it easier to serve later on. Some people commented that it was sort of like Haagen Dazs in being quite hard when you first take it out of the freezer, but softening up to a nice ice cream consistency after a few minutes.
- My sister said it tasted like frozen cream, but then realized that’s what ice cream is, literally. A bit on the icy side apparently?
