How To

This category contains 9 posts

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cinnamon, Oatmeal Cookie, Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream

I started wondering one day what would go together with cinnamon and chocolate in an ice cream.  The combination with oatmeal cookies just seemed to be a perfect match, so I tried it.  It’s become the most-often requested ice cream I’ve made, and one of the easiest to make.  It turns out Ben & Jerry’s […]

Pasteurized Eggs in Ice Cream

“This ice cream tastes great!  The chocolate is so rich, and there’s just a slight hint of salmonella.” Ok, so salmonella isn’t an ingredient you want to include when making ice cream, because it can make people pretty sick.  Although it could be argued that the chances of getting the salmonella bacteria from raw eggs […]

How To Make Ice Cream: The Sweet Cream Base

The place to start when making ice cream is with the Sweet Cream Base. It contains the basic ingredients for lots of recipes, and then you can add flavorings to make whatever you want. A great book to start with is Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book. It’s filled with no-nonsense recipes […]