Ice Cream Recipes

Ingridients

2 Cups Heavy Cream

1 Cup Half and Half

2/3 Cups of Sugar

1 Tsp Vanilla Extract (the best you can find)

1/8oz (Big Pinch) of Kosher Salt

Other Flavors - See Below

Optional Flavors (Choose One)

1 Tsp Vanilla Paste

1oz container of Freeze Dried Raspberries - Powdered

1oz container of Freeze Dried Peaches - Powdered

1oz container of Freeze Dried Strawberries - Powdered

1/4 Cup Dutch Process Cocoa Powder

1/4 Cup Matcha (Green Tea) Powder

Tools

Ice Cream Maker

So this is an accumulation of the various ice cream recipes I've figured out over the years, and I'll make a note about flavoring in this.

Also I do all of this in my Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker, one of the ones where you freeze the tub ahead of time. Follow the directions on yours, and scale this appropriately (I know mine can handle 3 cups of liquid). I also found that doing a really quick rinse of the frozen tub thing with warm water right ahead of making ice cream made it stick to the edges less.

I would not recommend substituting anything of the non-optional ingredients (with the exception of the Jam noted below). Two reasons for this, the first being that the chemistry matters when you go to stick it back in the freezer and keeping it from freezing into an ice cube later, the sugar is VERY important for this as it turns out. The second is that if you are going to make your own ice cream, you should make it good, don't skimp. Why bother with the effort otherwise!

The vanilla extract I recommend getting at Costco of all places. Its their "Pure Vanilla Extract". Its highly recommended by bakers and works well for this.

You can substitute whole milk for the half and half in a pinch, but the more fat you get into this, the creamier it will be. I don't know that I'd go less than whole, but feel free to try it out.

Also, since I learned this from Good Eats its worked out, if you want to add a bit of flavor with the sugar, you can replace the sugar with Jam or Jelly 1 for 1, especially homemade. I do this with my fruit options when I can.

Optional Flavors

I would choose one of these. I'm sure you can try to mix and match too, but its not really necessary.

You don't need to do any of these, but the vanilla gets better with the paste (Everyone really likes my vanilla), and people expect the vanilla taste in most ice creams. You also can do whole vanilla bean, but I find its a whole hassle to scrape it all out and its not worth it. Just use the paste, its cheaper too.

For the freeze dried fruit, I learned this from a dear friend who uses it for cream cheese frosting on cupcakes. It works really really well. When you do this, just toss the bag of it (I get it from Target) into a food processor and powder it up. This is what you'll add to the ice cream.

If you use the cocoa or Matcha powder, I highly highly recommend getting nice stuff here. I don't think you need to go nuts, but higher quality here does matter. If you want to make Green Tea Ice cream, make sure to get real matcha powder.

Instructions

1. Follow the instructions to setup your ice cream maker. I know mine takes 18hrs to freeze solid, so I need to plan that ahead of time (Though since I let it sit overnight, I often can toss it into the freezer the same time as when I start mixing everything).

2. In a pot on the stove, pour in the cup of half and half. Set your burner to medium-low. Let it sit for about 5 minutes, then pour in the sugar and mix until the sugar dissolves. Take it off the heat and let it sit for 10 minutes to cool.

3. While it cools, pour the 2 cups of heavy cream into a 1 quart or bigger container (Ideally with a spout). Add in the sugar and vanilla extract. Add in your optional flavoring to this as well.

4. After its cooled, pour your half and half into the heavy cream and mix thoroughly. Scrape the half and half pot to get any of the sugar on the bottom, and make sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl with everything in it to get it all mixed. A whisk is good here (But you don't need to make whipped cream).

5. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours. I prefer overnight. If you are doing the freeze-dried fruit, absolutely go overnight, a good 12 hours, because the fruit will absorb some of the liquid over that time.

6. Start your ice cream maker and follow its instructions. Thoroughly mix your ice cream mixture right before adding it to the ice cream maker. If you want to add chocolate chips (Or cocoa nips that I like to add) or fruit chunks, add it in right before (or during) adding it to the ice cream maker.

7. Scoop into freeze-able containers for your ice cream and stick into the freezer overnight. Feel free to lick the spoon after.

8. Another thing I learned from Alton Brown was that that weird thicker skin that forms on top of the ice cream even in the freezer comes from exposure to air. If you want to avoid it, push some wax paper down on top of it, even after you put it back in the freezer. However, it takes some time to form so you don't need to worry about it unless you are storing it for a long period of time.

Serving

Its Ice Cream, do what you want with it! Pretty sure you can figure this part out. Just eat it out of the container if you want!

Extra Chocolatey Chocolate Ice Cream

So the chocolate powder will supply a pretty decent chocolate ice cream. But if you want to go the extra mile, what you need to do is use a double boiler and melt 4oz of dark chocolate (The darkest you can find) into the half and half. Chop or grate it first to aid in melting. Then do all of the other same things. You might need to splash in up to half a cup of the heavy cream during the process to keep everything going.