Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream - My Gorgeous Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to making ice cream very creamy? ›

When it comes to great ice cream, cold temperatures and speed are your friends: the faster you bring your base from liquid to solid, the creamier it'll be. In a 2-quart unit, a typical batch of ice cream will take between 18 and 25 minutes to churn.

The cream cheese helps create an ice cream with a denser, smoother texture. As explained by TASTE, cream cheese acts as a stabilizer in ice cream, preventing water from seeping out of the milk and cream as well as preventing the formation of ice crystals that detract from ice cream's creaminess.

Sugar, corn syrup or honey, as well as gelatin and commercial stabilizers, can all keep your ice cream at a softer consistency. Ice cream also stays softer when you store it in a shallow container, rather than a deep tub, and cover the surface of the ice cream with plastic wrap to keep ice crystals from forming.

Vanilla Ice Cream Dessert FAQ

A good place to start is sweet and salty add-ons like pretzel bits, salted nuts, chocolate chips or crushed candy. You can also use dessert sauces like hot fudge, lemon curd or salted caramel sauce.

Most home ice cream recipes call for simple table sugar, which is chemically known as sucrose. But in pro kitchens you have more options. Liquid sugars like invert sugar, corn syrup, honey, and glucose syrup all add body, creaminess, and stability to ice cream, and a little goes a long way.

To ensure your homemade ice cream will come out creamy, use heavy cream, half-and-half or milk with a higher percentage milk fat, such as whole milk. If the ice cream is made with a lower percentage milk fat, it has the potential to become icy.

If you have ever made ice cream, you already know what goes into it, ingredients such as milk, cream, and sugar. But there is one main ingredient that you may not have thought about, probably because you can't see it—air.

Sweet castoreum has been used in vanilla flavourings for 200 years – but it has a horrifying source. The substance mostly comes from a beaver's castor sacs, which are located between the pelvis and the base of the tail, The Sun reports.

But it's important to remember that you're getting enough ingredients to make several batches of ice cream. If you can get 5 gallons out of these ingredients, then you've spent only $3.00 per gallon. That is less expensive than the average store-bought gallon. It can help you stay on track with your grocery budget.

The standard temperature for the freezer is around zero degrees. The problem with this is that it's actually too cold for scooping ice cream. The high butterfat and lack of air in most good-quality ice creams make them very hard at zero degrees.

Why add vodka to homemade ice cream? ›

Vodka lowers the freezing point of the ice cream thereby eliminating the formation of large ice crystals. It also bonds to the water and the fat making it capable of extracting flavor compounds. This results in a softer smooth creamy texture that doesn't get crunchy and that is maxed out with flavor.

1) Chill Your Base Thoroughly

In many cases, “aging” your base like this improves its flavor and texture, as ingredients combine and fat globules partially coalesce to form more stable air bubbles as the ice cream churns.

Raw cookie dough is another favourite addition — chocolate chip is particularly good. Also look at stirring in crunchy additions such as praline-coated nuts or toffee popcorn or just add nuts on their own — peanuts stirred in when you are rippling vanilla ice-cream with a salty caramel sauce are particularly good.

“Either chocolate sauce and whipped cream, fruit (raspberries, strawberries, peaches, baked pears) and chocolate sauce, or fruit and toasted nuts.”

At its core ice cream is a successful emulsion of fat into water, sugar, and ice with air mixed into the batch. An emulsion is a mixture of two substances that typically separate (like oil and water). But, instead mix together to form the consistent creamy base used for ice cream. It's Science!

Classic, French-style ice cream contains egg yolks. The number can vary from 4 to 10 yolks per 4 cups (1 litre) of liquid. The eggs yolks serve as an emulsifier that binds the water (which comes from the milk) and milk fat into a creamy mixture, much like mayonnaise.

So you can up the fat in your ice cream by substituting cream for milk or half-and-half in recipes. Even more effective, is that you can also add more egg yolks if making a custard-based ice cream, which will increase the creaminess due to their emulsifying properties.