It’s delightful. It’s alchemical. It’s satisfying to be making something physical, after so many years working on a computer. It’s ice cream. I’ve gotten into it deep, making batches all the time over the last year, and now I’m setting out to do it a lot more, and make a grant total of
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Right now, I’m just using a couple of Cuisinart ice cream makers, which use a chilled metal-lined tub to freeze the ice cream mix. And it's just the fridge freezer, no complicated deep freeze. So these are totally achievable at home.
Recipe 001: Blackberry Syrup Ice Cream
I started making ice cream because I wanted to use up some leftovers. There was some coffee cream, but also a bottle of grape yogurt drink concentrate. Well, mix em together and see if it works; that was was my first ice cream. And in the same spirit, here’s the first recipe.
A bottle of blackberry pancake syrup had been sitting in our fridge for a while. It wasn’t great as syrup, but I thought maybe turning it into ice cream would be a good use of it. There was an offhand reference in Ice Cream!: The Whole Scoop by Gail Damerow of a very simple maple syrup ice cream recipe. So I took that, scaled and rounded it to fit the amount of syrup left, and added a bit of salt and citric acid to cut the sweetness.
Ingredients:
1.25 cups blackberry syrup
2 cups whole milk
1/4 tsp citric acid
hefty one-finger pinch of kosher salt
Instructions:
Mix the syrup and milk together, chill in fridge for at least four hours.
Add in the acid and salt to taste, and churn for 15-20 minute until it reaches soft-serve consistency.
Put in a pre-chilled container and freeze for at least 4 hours.
TASTING RESULTS: The texture of the finished was not as stiff as I like, the final result was verging on slush. The taste was also not great. It was better than it was as a syrup, but the flavour comes in faint and then hits strong, no gentle ramp up, and leaves the metallic aftertaste of too much corn syrup. If the blackberry flavour had been stronger, maybe it’d mask the syrupy aftertaste.
WORTH MAKING: Not really, but we’re gonna keep trying out new ways to make ice cream from jams, syrups, and anything else that might need to get used up in your fridge.
Recipe 002: The Darkest Chocolate Ice Cream In The World, by Jeni Britton Bauer
The cream cheese base from Jeni’s Ice Cream founder is the ice cream base I’ve made the most. It’s a bit more complicated than others, but it doesn’t have the sudden-curdle touchiness or egg flavour of a custard base, and it’s creamier than a Philadelphia-style milk & cream base. I usually double the recipe without problems, but tripling it is too unwieldy. it’s been pretty flexible in terms of additions, like chocolate syrup. This recipe comes right from their book, except that the book uses a ziplock bag in ice to chill the mix before putting it in the fridge; I have a different method.
Chocolate syrup:
Ingredients:
0.5 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
0.5 cup brewed coffee
0.5 cup sugar
1/5 oz bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
Instructions:
Mix the cocoa and sugar into the coffee in a small saucepan, stirring over medium heat.
Bring to a boil for 30 seconds, then remove from heat, add chocolate, and let stand for 5 minutes.
Stir until smooth.
Base:
Ingredients:
2 cups whole milk
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon corn starch
1.5 oz (3 tablespoons) cream cheese, softened
1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 cup heavy cream
0.5 cup sugar
2 tablespoons light (clear) corn syrup
Chocolate syrup from above
Instructions:
Pour out two tablespoons of the milk into a small bowl, and mix in the corn starch to make a slurry.
Whisk the cream cheese, warm chocolate syrup, and salt in a medium metal (important later!) bowl until smooth
Get another bowl, larger than the medium bowl, and fill it a third full with ice and cold water. I’ve got two identical metal bowls, so I use one in the step above, and one for the ice water here.
Combine the remaining milk, cream, sugar and corn syrup in a large pot (the book says 4-quart saucepan, but I prefer larger) and bring the mix to a roiling boil over medium-high heat.
Boil for 4 minutes.
Remove from the heat and gradually whisk in the corn starch slurry.
Put the mix back on the heat and bring it to a boil, stirring with heatproof spatula, until slightly thickened (should take about 1 minute)
Remove from heat
Pour about a cup of the mix into the cream cheese bowl, whisking until smooth to incorporate everything.
Put the cream cheese bowl into the ice water bowl to cool the bottom, then pour in the rest of the mix from the pot.
Whisk everything to combine, stirring along the bottom to cool the mix.
Let it cool, stirring occasionally, until mix is no longer warm
Put in container and chill in fridge for at least four hours
Churn in mixer for 15-25 minutes, until a bit thicker than soft serve and surface looks almost dry, then put in chilled container and freeze for at least four hours.
TASTING RESULTS: A solid success, and a proven recipe from the Jeni’s book. It’s a very thick, very rich ice cream, and the heavy chocolate addition is easily held up by the base. Real crowd-pleaser.
WORTH MAKING: Definitely.
Recipe 003: Jalapeño-Lime Sorbet
This was a request from friend Pat. There’s a few recipes with jalapeno ice cream or sorbet out there, but I wanted to start with this lemon sorbet recipe from Serious Eats & modify it by adding jalapenos and using limes instead of lemons. I made a suspension/juice/forbidden matcha from the jalapenos and added it to the rest of the mix to bring in the flavour and heat. Jalapenos vary in their strength, so I bought six of em and picked the spiciest two. Good luck in your spicy pepper hunt!
Jalapeno juice:
Ingredients:
2 very spicy Jalapeno peppers
1oz vodka
Instructions:
Cut each jalapeno in half and remove the seeds, then dice the peppers into small peices
Soak peices in 1 oz of vodka for half an hour (less would probably be fine, that’s just how long I left em)
Blend jalapenos and vodka (I used a hand blender with a container attachment, to prevent bits from flying out and getting me in the eyes)
Strain the resulting pepper pulp using a metal strainer. I got 3 tablespoons of juice in the end.
The whole sorbet shebang:
Ingredients:
3 tablespoons jalapeno-vodka mix
1 + 1/3 cup of clear corn syrup
1.5 cup water
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 cup lime juice (although really, I squeezed eight limes, got about 0.85 cups of juice, then topped it up with 0.15c water to get a full cup)
Instructions:
Mix all the ingredients together, making sure the syrup and sugar is dissolved.
Chill in fridge for at least four hours.
Churn for 15-20 minutes, until mix is stiff.
TASTING RESULTS: Spicy! The peppers gives it nice warmth, not an urgent fire but more like the burn of whisky. Grassy, green whisky.
WORTH MAKING: This is a sorbet that’s hard to eat a regular-sized bowl of (unless you, like Pat, really love your jalapenos). But it’d be interesting to put a bit with other ice creams or foods, so I encourage you to give it a try!
Thanks for reading, and let me know if you try any of these recipes. Every week I’ll be posting one (or two, or three) more, until together we reach….