Russell

Russell has written 29 posts for Ice Cream Geek

Soy Milk Ice Cream

I know a couple of people that can’t drink milk, which means they suffer a fate worse than death: not being able to eat ice cream. The solution? Make ice cream from soy milk. But I discovered that there are two problems with making soy milk ice cream. First, soy milk has almost no fat […]

Häagen-Dazs Five

I love the idea behind Häagen-Dazs’s “Five” line of all-natural ice cream. Milk, cream, sugar, eggs, and a fifth ingredient for flavor. And absolutely nothing else. No stabilizers, no corn syrup, no artificial flavors or colors, just homemade ice cream at a grocery store. They have 7 flavors, but I just had to know what […]

German Chocolate Cake Ice Cream

When I talk to friends about ice cream, the conversation invariably turns into a brainstorming session about all the various kinds of dessert that could be made into an ice cream. So when my cousin’s son made a special request for German Chocolate Cake ice cream, it sounded like a great challenge. Chocolate ice cream with coconut, pecans, and caramel. How hard could it be?

Stabilizers in Ice Cream Part 2: Strawberry Ice Cream

Icy chunks of frozen strawberries in ice cream are the culinary equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard. Blending the fruit helps, but all the water in the juice still makes for an ice cream that tastes more cold and frosty than smooth and creamy. After my previous experiment with stabilizers in vanilla ice cream, I […]

Making an Ice Cream Butterfat Calculator

How much butterfat is in your homemade ice cream? It’s a difficult question to answer. Recently I sat down with a pencil, a stack of paper, and a big eraser, with a mission to make an online butterfat calculator. I decided to start with a Sweet Cream Base recipe of cream, milk, eggs, and sugar. […]

Making the Ultimate Chocolate Ice Cream

There’s a particular chocolate ice cream recipe that I’ve nicknamed “Oh My God Chocolate”, because those are usually the first words spoken by any female that tries it. It’s deep, rich, and creamy, and makes my wife’s eyes roll to the back of her head when she eats it. But when I used it once […]

Guinness Ice Cream

When I drink beer while eating ice cream, I’m never sure if the strange looks I get from people are because they think it’ll taste disgusting or because they think I’ll get sick — or both.  So when I heard about beer ice cream, well, how could anyone say drinking beer with ice cream was […]

Stabilizers in Ice Cream

Most commercial ice creams contain things like guar gum, locust bean gum, carrageenan, xanthan gum, polysorbate 80, monoglycerides, and diglycerides. What are these scary-sounding things, and why are they in our ice cream? In the ice cream business, these are all known as “stabilizers”, and they mainly help with two things: reducing iciness, and extending […]

Peppermint Ice Cream

I love peppermints.  I’m not into the super-strong mints, and definitely not the wintergreen kind — just the red and white ones you see in a bowl as you’re leaving a restaurant.  I’m one of those people that grabs a handful instead of just one.  My wife even bought me a big bag of them […]

Transporting Ice Cream With Dry Ice

We flew from Texas up to Rhode Island to visit some friends, and I wanted to take some homemade ice cream with us.  Actually our friend had jokingly asked me to bring some, so it got me wondering if it really was feasible.  It turns out, it is! Ice cream is great, except for that […]