“This ice cream tastes great! The chocolate is so rich, and there’s just a slight hint of salmonella.”
Ok, so salmonella [1] 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 are fairly low, it’s probably something you don’t want to mess around with, especially when serving ice cream to children or the elderly.
The most common ways of avoiding salmonella are to either leave out the eggs completely and just make Philadelphia style ice cream, or to heat the mix before churning it. My instructions for the Sweet Cream Base [2] include the steps to heat the mix and kill any salmonella that might be present.
But what if you don’t like that “cooked” flavor that heating the mix gives? (imagine the taste of warm milk — some people love it and some people… not so much) Or what if you’re just impatient like me, and don’t want to spend the time heating the mix and then cooling it back down before you can churn it?
There’s an alternative…
I’ve been lucky enough to find a grocery store [3] near me that sells Davidson’s Pasteurized Eggs [4]. These are eggs in the shell that have been dunked briefly in hot water, just long enough to kill anything that shouldn’t be in there, but not enough to cook them. There’s no difference in taste at all, and they’re perfect for ice cream. The mix doesn’t have to be cooked, and you can run it straight through the machine after mixing everything together because the ingredients are already cold when they come out of the fridge.