When everybody's screaming for ice cream, treat them to the homemade kind. It's no longer the nightmare to make that you remember.
By JANET K. KEELER
Published June 4, 2003
[Times photo: Scott Keeler]
Bing Cherry Ice Cream makes use of the sweet early season fruit arriving in markets now.
Making ice cream may be the only domestic art more impressive than sewing your own clothes.
But if you ask me, transforming milk, cream, sugar and egg yolks into ice cream is not nearly as difficult as fashioning fabric into a dress. I've not ruined a batch of ice cream, but I have plenty of horror stories about sewing, all of which end with a useless tangle of jersey and thread.
Homemade ice cream conjures dreamy summer memories of family gatherings and turns taken at the crank. For kids, the hard work was amply rewarded by ice cream loaded with fresh peaches or perhaps strawberries. However, many an adult will recall it as a messy undertaking, with rock salt, ice and heavy wooden buckets used to turn liquid into icy dessert.
Well, that was then. Today, a new generation of economical, small ice cream makers takes nearly all the manual labor out of the process. These electric whiz-bangs eliminate the crank and rock salt, relying on canisters lined with sealed liquid refrigerant that are stored in the freezer when not churning ice cream.
Models such as these from Donvier, Cuisinart, Rival and Krups cost about $50, and less-expensive versions are available, too. The drawback is that they make only about 1 quart each and the canister must be frozen solid before it can be used again. Cuisinart markets a double canister ice cream maker, which allows two flavors to be made at once, for about $75. There are also large electric units that look much like the old-fashioned versions. They yield up to 6 quarts of ice cream and can cost anywhere from $20 to $500. The quality, as you can imagine, varies wildly.
Making ice cream lets you select ingredients, be they organic milk and cream or peaches you've handpicked on your way through Georgia. It's simple to add or subtract nuts, pump up flavorings or even eliminate sugar or fat.
There's really no reason to make ice cream other than it tastes great, especially when a cruise down the frosty-door aisle at the grocery store shows the lengths to which food manufacturers go to satisfy our craving. There, you'll find:
-- Comfortable standbys made from whole milk and cream.
-- Fat-free and low-fat varieties for old school dieters.
-- Low-sugar and low-carb versions for diabetics and new school dieters.
-- Soy- and rice-based offerings (Tofutti and Rice Dream) for vegetarians and the lactose-intolerant.
-- Real and imagined brands from Europe, including sinfully smooth Norwegian Valhalla (authentic) and Haagen-Dazs (fake). (You may remember long-gone Frusen Gladje, which sounded Swedish but was American.)
-- Brands that appeal to your inner snob (Godiva and Starbucks) or '60s throwback persona (Ben & Jerry's).
And then there are the dozens of flavors to tempt us, though we reach for vanilla more than any other. Last year, Americans spent more than $4-billion on ice cream and ate an average of 23 quarts each.
But a pint of store-bought rocky road never gets the reaction that a bowl of homemade chocolate-nut-marshmallow elicits. You didn't invent cold fusion, but you wouldn't know it from the reverential gazes around the table.
"You made this?" someone whispers.
A new book from Williams-Sonoma inspired a recent flurry of ice cream making in my kitchen. The luscious photographs in Ice Cream (Simon & Schuster, $16.95) got me going even though I knew my finished products would never look as tantalizing. Regardless, my Rocky Road, Bing Cherry, and Pistachio and Dried Cherry ice creams tasted fabulous.
The Rocky Road was especially delicious, though I left out the nuts because I was entertaining a trio of 7-year-old boys finicky about lumps in their food. The marshmallows didn't cause such worry, but there was mention of gritty texture from adult tasters. The bits resulted from unintentionally shaving, rather than chopping, chocolate pieces added in the last five minutes of churning.
I attacked these three recipes the way most of you will: with not a lot of time and an unwillingness to stop at more than one store for ingredients. I used Baker's semi-sweet chocolate squares for the Rocky Road, though I know that a European chocolate such as Valrhona would impart more depth and smoothness. I couldn't find dried cherries for the pistachio ice cream, so I used cherry-flavored dried cranberries. (I've always thought that flavoring cranberries was odd, but I was thankful on this occasion.)
I even toyed with looking for another flavor when the Bing Cherry recipe called for halving and pitting two cups' worth. How much trouble was that going to be be? As it turned out, not much. It took about 5 minutes to cut the early season sweet cherries in half and pick out the stones.
All three ice creams earned raves despite my reservations, substitutions and choice of ingredients. Homemade ice cream is best eaten the day it's made, though you might want to freeze it for a few hours before serving. Most recipes recommend storing in an air-tight container and freezing for up to three days. But you'll still find that the taste and texture pales compared with what you licked off the churning paddles. Stabilizers in commercial ice creams maintain taste and texture.
Ice cream is essentially custard that's frozen and whipped simultaneously to add volume. Though there is some wiggle room on ingredients, especially nuts or amounts of fruit, the preparation instructions must be followed closely or a lumpy puddle might result.
Before going into the ice cream maker, most of the ingredients are heated in a saucepan until bubbles form around the edges of the liquid. The mixture cannot boil or the eggs will scramble and leave lumps. This is the reason custard is baked in a water bath.
Watching and stirring the pot is the most difficult chore in the process, and thank goodness, it can be accomplished without benefit of a culinary degree.
Making ice cream is easy; sewing a zipper into a skirt is hard. I know that from the dismal grade I earned in middle school home ec.
