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on ice cream
Dec. 1st, 2010 09:57 amI keep meaning to make food posts here; I have a few saved up in my mind that I still haven't written out. But last night and this morning I made maple ice cream with candied walnuts and that reminded me that I wanted to say something about ice cream.
First of all, ice cream isn't just for summer. Out here in the west it is - my favorite scoop shop in town closes down after the summer tourist season is over - but I grew up in the east, and went to grad school in the Boston area, which has (I read somewhere, and I can't find the statistic again, but this article pretty much describes it) the highest per-capita winter consumption of ice cream in the US.
This summer I bought an ice cream maker attachment for my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, and I have made a lot of ice cream since then. I started out by trolling the web for recipes, and that's still pretty much how I make new flavors, but with one exception; I pretty much always make the basic ice-cream part of it using Ben and Jerry's Sweet Cream Base, sometimes modified to account for other ingredients. (For example, for the maple ice cream I used this recipe as a starting point, so instead of the 3/4 cup sugar I used the reduced cup of maple syrup.) It doesn't really matter if the sweetener is mixed first with the eggs or the milk/cream, so I do what works with the recipe and ingredients. I also use 1.5 cups each of milk and cream, rather than 1:2.
There are two things I really like about this base recipe. First, it uses whole eggs, so I no longer have to come up with creative ways to use up the whites. (I mean, I love coconut macaroons, but I was getting tired of them...) Second, the texture has so far (we're talking 6 or 7 batches) been perfect. The ice cream I made with lots of yolks always seemed to be too hard when removed from the freezer, and I had to chip small hunks off rather than scooping up big spoonfuls. The salted caramel ice cream from Cooking Light (that should have been a clue right there) was unpleasantly grainy. (But it tasted awesome, and I have since made it again with the sweet cream base, and oh, YUM.) The peach ice cream that I made with whipped egg whites (don't ask) was HORRIBLE. But all of the ice creams I have made using variations of the sweet cream base have been tasty, creamy, and when I pull the container from the refrigerator, the exact consistency to scoop out easily.
Mmm, ice cream.
First of all, ice cream isn't just for summer. Out here in the west it is - my favorite scoop shop in town closes down after the summer tourist season is over - but I grew up in the east, and went to grad school in the Boston area, which has (I read somewhere, and I can't find the statistic again, but this article pretty much describes it) the highest per-capita winter consumption of ice cream in the US.
This summer I bought an ice cream maker attachment for my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, and I have made a lot of ice cream since then. I started out by trolling the web for recipes, and that's still pretty much how I make new flavors, but with one exception; I pretty much always make the basic ice-cream part of it using Ben and Jerry's Sweet Cream Base, sometimes modified to account for other ingredients. (For example, for the maple ice cream I used this recipe as a starting point, so instead of the 3/4 cup sugar I used the reduced cup of maple syrup.) It doesn't really matter if the sweetener is mixed first with the eggs or the milk/cream, so I do what works with the recipe and ingredients. I also use 1.5 cups each of milk and cream, rather than 1:2.
There are two things I really like about this base recipe. First, it uses whole eggs, so I no longer have to come up with creative ways to use up the whites. (I mean, I love coconut macaroons, but I was getting tired of them...) Second, the texture has so far (we're talking 6 or 7 batches) been perfect. The ice cream I made with lots of yolks always seemed to be too hard when removed from the freezer, and I had to chip small hunks off rather than scooping up big spoonfuls. The salted caramel ice cream from Cooking Light (that should have been a clue right there) was unpleasantly grainy. (But it tasted awesome, and I have since made it again with the sweet cream base, and oh, YUM.) The peach ice cream that I made with whipped egg whites (don't ask) was HORRIBLE. But all of the ice creams I have made using variations of the sweet cream base have been tasty, creamy, and when I pull the container from the refrigerator, the exact consistency to scoop out easily.
Mmm, ice cream.