Homemade Ice Cream

It seemed like it took forever for the ice cream to freeze. Under the Kansas sun, it was blazing hot and the sidewalk burned our bare feet. My dad and Uncle Howard took turns cranking the churn. We begged to turn the handle, but only got to make a few turns at the start. The ice was packed around the metal cylinder and covered with a burlap sack. A steady trickle of salty, ice water streamed out the overflow hole on the side of the wooden ice cream freezer. The salt made the ice melt faster which sped up the freezing process.

As the ice cream hardened, the handle got harder and harder to turn so it was a job for the dads. We would take turns sitting on the gunny sack that covered the top. That helped keep the churn still for the person doing the cranking.

Finally it was deemed ready and the cylinder filled with ice cream was taken to the kitchen. The mothers dished out the ice cream and scraped it off the dasher. If you were lucky, you got to lick the remainder off the metal dasher. We would top our ice cream with chocolate syrup and on the side, we always had the pale pink and cream colored cookies with the icing in the center. What were those called?

There are several different styles of ice cream makers available nowadays. You can still buy ones that you have to turn by hand, but most have electric paddles to do the mixing for you. You'll have to decide whether you want a bucket style one that uses ice and rock salt, one that uses a pre-frozen disc, or a self-cooling one.

Our ice cream maker is an electric one that has a disc you put in the freezer and then when you are ready to make ice cream you take out the disc and insert it into the machine. I wanted to make homemade ice cream without rock salt, because I didn't like the idea of always having to buy rock salt. Plus I'm kind of lazy and the idea of having a disc seemed much simpler than ice and rock salt. Our disc sits in our freezer so we're ready to make ice cream in a moment's notice.

The self-cooling ice cream makers are quite sophisticated, but they also come with a higher price tag. They can be a bit expensive for most families to take advantage of, but if you can afford them they are quite nice.

The quality of the ice cream depends on the ingredients that go into it. For instance, there's a difference in taste between imitation vanilla and real vanilla so use the best quality ingredients wherever you can. Buy "vanilla extract" which ensures it is derived from the beans, rather than imitation vanilla. Vanilla beans are still even a better choice. There's nothing like the taste of ice cream that is home made.

Let's face it, the richness of the ice cream depends on the richness of the cream. If you are dieting eat less, rather than using a cream of a lower fat content. Lower fat creams produce a hard, ice-textured ice cream. Ideally the fat content of the cream should be around 36 per cent. This is usually labelled as whipping cream in the U.S.

Always opt for whole milk rather than 1% or 2% because the lower fat milks will upset the texture and flavor of the ice cream. The fresher the better.

The cocoa sold in the powder form in stores is either alkalised or non-alkalised however it's not always noted on the container. You'll get better results from using an alkalised cocoa powder if you can find it.

It's the percentage of chocolate solids that give chocolate its chocolate taste. Choose a chocolate with a high cocoa solids content. Milk chocolate doesn't produce as good results as dark chocolate. Choose a dark chocolate with solids over 45 per cent for best results.

If you've ever read the ingredient list on store bought ice cream you'll see all kinds of chemical sounding names of stuff they add to the ice cream to keep it from melting. If you leave the ice cream out on the counter for 20 minutes, when you come back it's likely the ice cream will still be in a solid. Homemade ice cream melts faster than store bought ice cream because all the ingredients are pure and there are no additives in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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