How to Make Homemade Ice Cream

Making ice cream at home couldn’t be any easier than with this simple steps. Homemade ice cream is the best because you can make it the way YOU like!

July, to me, seems to be the hottest month in the year. And what better way to cool you down than to enjoy some refreshing ice cream! It’s the epitome of summer time eatery and just about every restaurant has it. Now, I do like a good ice cream from Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s but there is nothing more delicious than homemade ice cream. The best part of making your own is that you can make it the way YOU want it (I’m still waiting for someone to sell chocolate and peanut butter cookie dough ice cream, delicious right?!).

My darling hubby bought me an ice cream attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer a few years ago and oh my has it changed my world! What I love about this attachment is that it doesn’t require ice or salt. You just dump your mix into the bowl, let it spin and bam! You’ve got soft serve ice cream! The only down side is that you do need to plan ahead and freeze the bowl about 14 hours before you want to make ice cream, which can take up space in a tiny freezer, but, it does the trick and I love it so much!

The key, and a very important thing to remember when developing your own recipes, to making great ice cream is that you have to “over season” your ice cream base. When a food freezes, the intensity of flavor changes. My close-to-genius husband explained to me that there are more atoms coming into contact with a surface at a liquid stage rather than a solid stage. Little chemistry lesson for ya there. So your base is going to have a lot more sugar in it than you think ought to be in there when it’s at a liquid stage but once it freezes, the intensity of the sugar and chosen flavorings will mellow out quite a bit. If you think your base tastes too much like vanilla or mint or chocolate, your base is perfectly seasoned. Besides, it’s your ice cream!

I’m giving you a basic ice cream base from which you can make pretty much any ice cream you would like to make. Before I give you the recipe though, let me give you some pointers as far as technique is concerned; we don’t want scrambled eggs in our ice cream. Ew.

1. Temper your eggs.

This doesn’t mean you need to let your yolks come to room temperature. What this means is that you can’t just add your yolks to very hot cream. Egg yolks begin to coagulate at 140 degrees. Milk begins to boil at 212 degrees. Your milk and cream mixture is already 70 degrees hotter than what it takes to scramble eggs; you must slowly bring your eggs up while cooling down the cream mixture. Do this by slowly adding the cream mixture to the egg yolks while whisking. This simultaneously cools down the cream and warms up the eggs. You only need to add maybe two ladles of warmed cream to the eggs before adding it to all of the cream and milk waiting in the sauce pot.

2. Strain your base.

So remember that eggs coagulate at 140 degrees, when you bring your eggy cream mixture up to help set the proteins in the eggs, there is bound to be some curdling going on. We don’t want any of that scrambled mess in our deliciously smooth ice cream. Once the eggs and cream start to thicken and bubble, pull from the heat and strain through a fine mesh strainer into a bowl.

3. Have an ice bath ready before straining.

Having an ice bath is crucial to the integrity of your ice cream base. Well, first off, what is an ice bath??? An ice bath is simply a container filled with ice and water. The purpose of an ice bath is to rapidly cool a hot liquid housed in another container. We do this with the ice cream base by straining the base into a bowl and place that bowl on top of an ice bath in a slightly bigger bowl. The ice bath should surround the smaller bowls sides equally to insure that the liquid gets as much exposure to the ice waters’ surface as possible. This helps stop the cooking of the eggs (remember, no scrambled eggs in ice cream) and helps cool the base evenly to stop the development of food borne germs. Those don’t taste good in ice cream either.

Make an easy date shake by blending 8 dates, 1 1/2 cups ice cream with 1 cup of milk!

With those easy tips in mind and this recipe, you are set to making amazing ice cream!

What are your favorite flavors of ice cream?

Happy eating!

Print

Basic Ice Cream Base

Prep Time

5 mins

Cook Time

10 mins

Total Time

6 hr 15 mins

 

An easy to follow ice cream recipe that you can alter for your own tastes!

Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Servings: 11 1/2 cup servings

Calories: 268 kcal

Author: ijustmakesandwiches

Ingredients

• 20 ounces whole milk
• 14 ounces Heavy Cream
• 6 each egg yolks
• 7 ounces Sugar
• 1 ounce corn syrup
• 1 each vanilla bean if no bean available, use 1 Tablespoon vanilla extract

Instructions

1. In a medium saucepot, bring everything, except egg yolks, to a boil.
   
2. Separate eggs. Place yolks in a medium bowl.
   
3. Carefully ladle some of the cream mixture into egg yolks, making sure to whisk quickly. Add two ladles of cream mixture to egg yolks. Add yolks to the rest of the cream mixture in sauce pot.
   
4. Over medium heat, bring egg yolks and cream to a bubble, whisking continuously.
   
5. Once medium size bubbles are achieved, strain mixture into a bowl sitting on an ice bath. Discard any scrambled eggs.
   
6. Stir base with a spatula until base cools down, about 15 minutes.
   
7. Let base cool completely in the fridge. About 3-4 hours.
8. Take ice cream making attachment out of the freezer and set up with Kitchen Aid mixer. Add ice cream base to bowl and turn Kitchen Aid on to lowest setting, Stir.
9. Let ice cream spin for 20 minutes total. If adding anything to the base, add it at the last 2 minutes of spinning.
10. Once 20 minutes are up, put ice cream into containers and allow to fully freeze for another 3-4 hours.
11. Scoop and serve.

Recipe Notes

*To make this Nutella Swirl ice cream, add ½ cup Nutella at the last 2 minutes of spinning. Stop once incorporated.