You're Going to Make Ice Cream This Summer!
Hey everyone,
Allow me to step on to my soap box for a second. Have you ever made homemade ice cream? What about sorbet? Gelato? No?! Well you, my friend, are missing out on one of the most joyful, rewarding, and lick-able things you can do in your kitchen… especially in the summer. Not convinced? Here are the main reasons why you need to make your own ice cream this summer:
(1) You don’t need a fancy ice cream maker to make ice cream.
A basic 1.5 quart Cuisinart ice cream costs $67.97 on Amazon. This is the ice cream maker that I’ve had for over fifteen years and it still works just as well as the day that I bought it. As you can see from the pic above, there are four parts: the lid, the spinner thingie, the freezer bucket, and the base. If you store the freezer bucket in your freezer (like I do), you can make ice cream whenever you want. (The more that you make it, the more you’ll want to make it again.)
The difference between this and more expensive ice cream makers is that the fancier ones can chill down your base immediately so that once you make your custard, you can pour it right in and churn your ice cream. Big whoop! It’s really not that big of a deal to refrigerate your base for a few hours. I made this rum raisin ice cream base yesterday morning and churned it yesterday afternoon.
Homemade ice cream will always taste better than store-bought ice cream.
Homemade peach ice cream from two years ago. Not to get all Alice Watersy on you, but if you look at the side of your store bought ice cream carton, you’ll see things like Xantham gums and other chemicals whose names you can’t pronounce. Homemade ice cream, on the other hand, always has the same basic ingredients: cream, milk, egg yolks, and sugar. You essentially make a custard and then flavor that custard with whatever you’re making.
And the thrill of tasting it once it’s churned? Electric. It tastes so pure, so fresh, so unadulterated. You don’t know what fresh ice cream tastes like until you dip a spoon into your own personal machine after its been churning for twenty minutes. Even if you go to a local store that makes ice cream from scratch, it still can’t taste as good as the one you make yourself. It just can’t.
Your guests will go crazy for homemade ice cream / sorbet.
As someone who loves to make dessert for a dinner party, I’ve experienced all the validation and love that you get when you serve a cake, a pie, or cookies to an eager crowd. But nothing comes close to the thrill of arriving to the table with homemade ice cream.
The simplest homemade ice creams are often the best: like this pure vanilla bean. Maybe it’s because most dinner party meals can be a bit heavy (well they are at my house), so a scoop of something frozen is a welcome sight because it’s so refreshing. And the fact that you made it yourself? People can’t believe it. A soup container filled with homemade ice cream — bonus points if you hand write the name of the ice cream on a piece of tape on the side — brought to the table with an ice cream scooper for people to help themselves? That gets an A+ in the entertaining department.
It’s really easy.
Here’s how you make homemade ice cream. Step one: put some egg yolks into a bowl. Step two: heat cream, milk, and sugar with a pinch of salt until steamy. Step three: rapidly whisk your egg yolks and pour the hot liquid in so they don’t curdle. Step four: pour the mixture back into the pot and keep stirring on low heat until it’s thick. Step five: strain, chill, and churn.
That’s it! Of course, you can flavor that base in hundreds of different ways: with real vanilla beans, with melted chocolate, with fresh mint, with strawberries from the farmer’s market. And if you make sorbet? It’s as simple as putting fruit in a food processor, adding lemon juice and sugar, and churning.
Dare I say that sorbet from summer fruit is the ultimate expression of said summer fruit? It’s like the distilled essence of strawberries or melon or peaches or whatever it is that you want to churn into a frozen dessert. And best of all, the freezer preserves that flavor for you so you get to experience the intensity of fresh summer fruit for the rest of the month… if it lasts that long.
So if you’ve ever thought about making ice cream at home, now’s the time to get yourself an ice cream maker. Because summer is less than two weeks away and you — yes, you! — need to be churning all summer long.
Bonus tips:
Look for ice cream / sorbet recipes with a little booze in them. They make your frozen desserts a little softer / more scoopable.
Really make sure to cool down your ice cream base before churning. It should be cold to the touch before it goes in (otherwise it won’t freeze properly).
You know your ice cream is done churning when it gets to the consistency of soft-serve. It’ll set up the rest of the way once it’s in the freezer.
Best resources:
The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. As far as I’m concerned, this is the only ice cream cookbook that you need. It’s got perfect recipes for everything and the Malted Milk ice cream with Whoppers in it? It’s out of this world.
La Grotta: Ice Creams and Sorbets by Kitty Travers. I picked up this book at a gourmet store here in LA and I’ve loved it ever since for the pictures and the design; the recipes are fun too (that’s where the peach ice cream recipe, included below, comes from).
The Salt & Straw Ice Cream Cookbook by Tyler Malek. I’m a big fan of Salt & Straw the store, and though I don’t own this book, if I were going to buy another ice cream cookbook, this might be it. I have a friend who churned his way through it and loved every recipe. I have a feeling I would too.
So, this newsletter ended up turning into ice cream propaganda!
I swear I’m not getting paid off by Cuisinart or the Frozen Dessert Deep State. I just love making homemade ice cream and I want you to love making it too.
See you next time!
Your pal,
Adam
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