Homemade Ice Cream 101, Part 1

Homemade ice cream is so different, so much better than even the best commercially made stuff, that is has been worth the long time it took me to figure out the proportions and technique involved. I can whip up a simple vanilla that will completely knock your socks off and it’s got 5 ingredients (sugar, vanilla, eggs, cream and milk) and takes all of 10 minutes of actual cooking time, although due to the fact that you have to let your custard cool before you can churn, you need at least 2-3 hours to make homemade ice cream.

You can make ice cream in two ways – with or without eggs. French Style with eggs and Philadelphia Style without eggs. I make it French Style. I’ve never been able to get the Philadelphia style to work at all – it always freezes rock hard and icy, but you can experiment with that if you like (I hear adding booze helps!). It’s much easier to do as there’s no custard-making involved so it’s a good place to start.

Ice cream is always a 2:1 cream to milk ratio. Flip that 1:2 cream to milk and you get gelato (also a fine thing to make!). You can remove the cream altogether, replace the lost liquid with fruit juice and you’ve made a sherbet.

We’re talking about ice cream today, so we’re talking a 2:1 cream to milk ratio and our base recipe is always the same. Getting the base recipe right was a struggle for me. I went through a lot of failed recipes before I found one from the Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream Book that worked for me.

The good news is that once you put the work in to getting the base recipe right, you can make any flavor at all. It’s really the base recipe that’s the tricky part and beyond that, the experimentation possibilities are endless. So here’s the base recipe plus technique. In the next post, I’ll tell you how I made coffee ice cream, cantaloupe/mint/lime ice cream, chocolate chip gelato, and peppermint ice cream all from the same base recipe. The pictures here are from coffee ice cream, hence the color, but we won’t go into infusing flavor yet. I’m going to teach you how to make the base custard from which all your ice cream experiments will flow!

I’m not copying exactly what’s in the Humphrey Slocombe book, but I highly recommend you buy that. Here I am trying to give you a visual and description of what the ice cream should look and feel like at all stages since the technique takes a little bit of practice. My suggestion is that you not make the below – it’s not flavored. Just read through and get ready for more fun stuff in the next post, when you can refer back to this one.

Ingredients Needed:

3 egg yolks
1 cup sugar
2 cups cream
1 cup milk
1 tsp salt

Equipment Needed:
A medium sized non-reactive saucepan
2 medium sized bowls
1 large bowl
1 strainer that fits on the medium sized bowl
Ice cream maker (I use a Cuisinart)

Instructions:

1. Start by putting the bowl of the ice cream maker into the freezer for at least 24 hours before you start. It’s essential that this be as cold as possible or your ice cream won’t churn.

2. Mix your egg yolks and sugar in one of the medium bowls until the sugar is well-blended into the egg yolks (it will still be gritty – don’t beat it so much that it is fluffy).

3. Place your cream, milk and salt in your saucepan and heat until almost (but not) boiling. Generally this is where you’ll add your flavor component – vanilla bean and extract goes right in here if you are making vanilla ice cream.

4. While that is heating up, get a bunch of ice and a little bit of water and place it in your large bowl. Fit your other medium bowl inside the large bowl and your strainer on top of the medium bowl.

5. Once your milk/cream mixture is hot, get a whisk and start whisking the egg/sugar mixture. Add the hot dairy a little at a time, mixing constantly. This is the part that can get hairy. Keep mixing until you’ve added 1/3 to 1/2 of your hot dairy into the eggs and sugar. Make sure the sugar is dissolved.

6. Add the egg mixture back into your saucepan with the rest of the hot milk and cream and stir stirs stir. The heat should be at about medium at this point. Keep stirring constantly for the next 8-10 minutes. What you’ve just made is a creme anglaise, a type of custard! If you wanted to, you could stop here and refrigerate and you’d have a nicely set, eggy custard for dessert.

7. Here is the other tricky part: Knowing when the custard is done. Pulling the custard off the heat at just the right moment is essential for getting a creamy – and not icy – ice cream later. Many books recommend the “back of the spoon” method. Dip a spoon in the custard and watch to see how fast it drips back down into the saucepan. I could never really see much difference, so I basically go on the feel of how much resistance the custard has to my stirring spoon. You can also put a little bit on a plate, run your finger through it and see how quickly it flows back together. The custard should be pretty thick when you pull it off the heat.

8. Once it’s done, you want it to stop cooking immediately, which is why you made the ice bath. Strain through your strainer into the medium bowl, now surrounded by ice and cold water. Straining removes any egg solids that may have formed when you added hot liquid to the eggs and sugar and also any flavoring agents you may have added that you don’t necessarily want people to crunch down on when they eat your ice cream later (cardamom pods or tea bags or whatever).

9. Once strained, cover and put in the fridge for no less than 2 hours, preferably more. You want it as chilled as possible when you start to churn it.

10. After your 2-3 hours are up (and I know, the waiting is the hardest part), remove the ice cream maker bowl from the freezer and set it up. Remove the custard from the fridge and start churning. Churning should take anywhere from 10-15 minutes, depending on how hard a churn you like. If you’re adding candy (chocolate chips, M&Ms, etc.) to your ice cream, it goes in during the churning process.

11. Remove from ice cream maker and enjoy! It should be more like soft serve when it first comes out of the ice cream maker. If you want to let it stiffen up before serving, put it in a container (we just use Tupperware) and stick it in the freezer for about an hour. I like soft serve (and also I impatient), so I usually eat it right out of the ice cream maker and I am just fine with that. This recipe makes about 4-6 servings of ice cream. It’s very rich, so small servings will satisfy.

Red Sauce

You could have guessed I’d start here.

If you know me, you know I’m Italian-American on my Dad’s side and that I take the designation very seriously. Part of that is because I spent more time around my Dad’s family growing up. The other part is that my identity as an Italian-American gives me a sense of community I think I’d otherwise be lacking. We moved around a lot when I was growing up; I’ve still got that wanderlust in me, so having a distinct culture I can ground myself in has been important to me throughout my life as I hopped from city to city, country to country.

Being able to make a good red sauce is an intrinsic part of my Italian-American identity. I’ve done this particular recipe so many times I think probably my children will come out of the womb knowing how to make it because it will be encoded in their DNA.I grew up smelling the magical red sauce smells coming from my grandfather’s kitchen and those memories are some of the strongest I have of my childhood. After Grandpa died, he left his art collection to his children. My parents, in turn, offered to give me one of the paintings. I chose this one that hung in his kitchen If you look super closely, you might be able to see that in the lower left-hand corner there’s a small, red stain on the tablecloth. That’s red sauce that my grandfather somehow got on the canvas while cooking or eating.

The painting now hangs in my kitchen and I like to think of it as a cooking good luck talisman; something that can help me make good food and create a sense of identity for my own family one day.

I have a couple of staple red sauces: A summer sauce, which uses fresh tomatoes, a “weekday” sauce, which cooks up in 30 minutes and includes lots of onion and this sauce, which has some very simple ingredients that are allowed to cook down for an hour plus. It’s infinitely customizable. I’m a vegetarian, but if I were not, I’d brown some pork and throw it in. I’m giving the below recipe as I make it with pantry staples, but of course you could sub fresh herbs (I usually do). Make it spicy by throwing in a jalapeno and some red pepper flakes. Make it smoky by adding paprika. It’s really whatever suits your needs.

I make a big batch, eat it on pasta the night I make it, and then keep it in the freezer for a quick weeknight meal or to make lasagna or other recipes later. It makes my house smell like home, by which I mean garlic and onion and tomato and basil, forever the smells of a childhood in an Italian-American home.

Ingredients
2 T Olive oil
1 large onion
3 cloves garlic
3 carrots
3 stalks of celery
1/4 cup dry white wine
2 28oz cans of tomatoes, either whole or chopped, depending on preference (preferably San Marzano tomatoes)
Basil
Oregano
1 T butter (optional)

Instructions

1. Heat the olive oil in a large sauce pan. I use my 5.5 quart french oven.
2. Chop the onion, garlic, carrots and celery as small as you want them. If you’re looking for a smoother tomato sauce, chop fine. If you like your sauce more like a ratatouille, you can leave the carrots and onion in larger chunks (still best to finely mince the celery and garlic).
3. Once the oil is hot, add the garlic and onion and sauté until the onion starts to sweat (3 min or so).
4. Add the celery and carrots, cover with a tight-fitting lid and cook until all the vegetables have softened significantly (15 minutes or so).
5. Deglaze the pot with the white wine and add the tomatoes. If using dried herbs, add about 1 T basil and 1 T oregano at this point.
6. Cover and simmer gently for about an hour.
7. The sauce is done when it has cooked down about a quarter of an inch or a little more and the tomatoes have darkened and lost their raw acidity.
8. Turn the heat off an add the butter if you’re using it – adding butter helps bind the sauce together, but it’s not necessary for a flavorful sauce. If using fresh herbs, add them when adding the butter, after the sauce is off the heat.

Hearty deliciousness