You can make homemade ice cream with no equipment other than a pan or a big bowl, a spoon and
a freezer. It's not the easiest or the best way to make ice cream — I prefer the two
bowls method and I have a whole video about that in the description. But what I'm gonna
show you now is the simplest way to make ice cream and it can be a lot of fun if you get
creative.
This recipe is sponsored by Squarespace, certainly the simplest way of making and running a website.
Get 10 percent off yours with my link and code in the description.
This is called the "still freeze" method of making ice cream, and you can do it with any
ice cream base recipe, but here's my go-to base. 3/4 cup of sugar, 150 grams. 2 cups
of cream, 475 ml. 1 cup of milk, 235 ml — ideally evaporated milk.
That is milk that has been cooked in a vacuum pan. The lower the air pressure, the lower
the boiling point, so you can boil off a lot of the water without actually getting it that
hot and changing the flavor of the milk very much, though it does have a slight caramel
flavor.
The main reason to use this over regular milk in ice cream is the protein content. It helps
make the ice cream smoother, which is particularly useful when you do a no-egg recipe like I'm
ddoing here. A big splash of vanilla, and that is it. Eggless recipes require no pre-cooking,
therefore I think they're better for a barebones, kid-friendly ice cream-making approach like
we're doing today.
I'll just stir that up, and if it feels like the sugar isn't all dissolving, don't worry
about it. Once this starts to freeze, it'll become more viscous, which will make stirring
a lot easier, and freeze it and stir it we will. The wide pan is good because it creates
so much surface area and helps the ice cream chill faster here in the freezer.
If you just have a medium-sized bowl, you could use that instead of the wide pan, but
I'd cut the recipe in half. The original recipe will make a quart of ice cream. This will
make a pint. In the freezer that goes too, until it just starts to go firm but not hard.
I let this first one get a little too hard. I left it in there for 45 minutes, and you
can see all that milky ice I'm pulling off the sides. I now have to break that up a little
bit. This would have been easier if I'd stirred it sooner — let that be your lesson. Just
break up all that ice, stir everything around really well, and throw it back in the freezer.
The bowl shape actually makes this a lot easier. It's easier to scrape the frozen stuff off
the sides and it's easier to mix it really vigorously. Back in that goes. And that thing
we just did? We're gonna keep doing that until it looks like ice cream.
Half an hour later, here we are. Scrape everything off the sides — a wooden spoon is more gentle
on your pan — and stir. Really stir. We need to spread all the cold evenly through
the mixture. Yes, from a physics standpoint, heat always moves from the warmer thing to
the colder thing, but I think at a practical level it makes more intuitive sense to think
about spreading the cold. Back they go into the freezer.
Another half an hour goes by. That's starting to look like ice cream. Or mayonnaise. Scrape
those corners. That's where the cold is hiding, and in addition to spreading the cold, we
want to think about breaking up any big ice crystals and whipping in a little air, so
stir really aggressively. That's, again, a lot easier to do I think in the bowl. You
just can't make as much ice cream at a time in a normal bowl.
Another half hour goes by. I think 30 minutes is the maximum time to wait in-between stirrings.
The more frequently you stir, the smoother the finished ice cream will be. This one in
the bowl is looking done after just two hours and four stirrings.
The one in the pan needed another half hour — 2.5 hours and five total stirrings. You're
done when it looks and tastes like soft-serve ice cream, which is exactly what this is.
What would happen if you never stirred it at all? If you just threw it into the freezer?
Well, it would look like this. This is not ice cream. This is just a sweet, greasy ice
cube, because it has huge ice crystals. The frequent agitation of churning creates a frozen
sweetened cream filled with lots of tiny ice crystals and a little bit of air, AKA ice
cream.
We could just call that done, or we could put more stuff in it — any chunkies you
want. Get creative. I'm crumbling a bunch of chocolate chip cookies into this one.
Perhaps the easiest way to make a fruity ice cream is to stir in some jam or preserves.
I've got this beautiful local blackberry jam, and stir in as much as tastes good to you.
Be aware, though, you're introducing a lot of heat back into the mixture — same deal
with the cookies — so you'll have to send it back through one or two more cycles of
freezing and stirring.
Here's the blackberry ice cream after just another half hour, that's perfect. I don't
know if it's the sugar or the pectin or what in the jam, but jam really smooths out the
texture and seems to regulate the ice cream's temperature. Homemade soft serve tends to
melt really fast, but this is really holding its own. Nonetheless, you could over it up
and leave it in the freezer now.
Fat tends to absorb freezer odors, so once you're ready to leave this in there overnight,
you want to get it sealed.
That cookie ice cream needed two more freeze-stir cycles, so it took three hours and six total
stirrings. Eat it soft serve or freeze it overnight. Let it harden. No, it will not
freeze into a greasy ice cube. We have seeded it with lots of very small ice crystals and
some air.
It will simply set from soft serve ice cream into hard ice cream. Look at that. Granted,
the ice crystals in it are on the large side for ice cream. Noticeable on the palate. This
is a crude ice cream churning method that results in a crude product, but it's still
really delicious.
The jam ice cream is interesting. Like I said, the jam seems to regulate its temperature
and that cuts both ways. This has been in the freezer for 24 hours and it's still pretty
soft and fast-melting. Oh well, let's call it permanent soft serve then — it's not
a bug, it's a feature!
OK, let's do another one. The ideal vessel for the still-freeze churning method may just
be a huge bowl, assuming you have one, and assuming you can fit it in your freezer. I'll
do a full, 1-quart batch in here. 2 cups of cream, one cup of milk, preferably evaporated,
and say you want chocolate ice cream.
Even if you're doing a no-egg recipe, you generally have to pre-cook a chocolate ice
cream base, for the simple reason that cocoa powder does not disperse easily in cold or
room-temperature liquid. I doubt you want your chocolate ice cream chunky-style.
So, you could just cook any chocolate ice cream base recipe you find, cool it down again
and then churn it. Or, you could swap out the sugar in my basic recipe for chocolate
syrup. Instead of 3/4 cup of sugar, put in 3/4 cup of chocolate syrup, 175 ml. Yes, a
lot of the mass in here is cocoa, but you'll still end up with enough sugar, because this
is made with corn syrup, which is sweeter than cane sugar.
Don't think too much about it — just taste it, and if you want more, put in more. I think
I did like cup total. In the freezer that goes for its first chill.
Curious about this creepy green pan I've got in here? This is just my normal base recipe,
plus a splash of almond extract instead of vanilla. Extracts are the easiest way to flavor
ice cream. Orange extract, lemon, mint — go crazy.
But because extracts don't much affect the appearance of the ice cream, people usually
put in some food coloring too. Yes, I know almonds aren't green, but neither is mint
extract, ya know. None of this is natural.
Be aware the food coloring usually looks more vivid after it has frozen.
Here's the chocolate after a half hour. Scrape down the sides, break up any frozen stuff
and spread that cold around. The bowl shape really does make it easier than the pan shape.
How many freeze and stir cycles you have to go through depends on the shape of your vessel,
the power of your freezer, all kinds of things, but generally you're talking about a 2-3 hour
process, most of that time being unattended. It's a totally easy and fun thing to do if
you're just in for the night watching TV or something — a literal Netflix and chill.
So here's the finished chocolate soft serve. Who wants some chunkies? I'll put some M&Ms
in a tea towel and bash them a bunch of times with the bottom of a pot. A food processor
would certainly be easier. In those go, and remember, they're introducing a lot of heat,
so this'll need another freeze and stir cycle. Be careful about stirring this too much now
— it'll make the M&M colors bleed. That's why you can't put them in at the beginning.
Though other chunks you could put in at the beginning.
Terrific soft-serve texture — I think I'll eat whatever doesn't fit into my 1-quart freezer
container. Remember that chunks will add significantly to the volume of the final product, so we've
got more than a quart here. Here that is after it's hardened for 24 hours. Harden it overnight,
at least, I'd say. Delicious.
Now, for my green almond ice cream, I could put in chocolate chips, but I want to try
what the Italians call stracciatella ice cream. You just take some solid chocolate and just
barely melt it. If you're using the microwave, pull it before you see the chips visibly melting.
They'll liquify as you stir.
You could do this the old-fashioned way over a double boiler. You just don't want to get
it too hot, because melted chocolate has this weird property where it actually starts to
get firmer as it gets hotter, and we need this as liquid as possible, so just barely
melt it.
We want to take the finished ice cream out of the freezer and then drizzle thin strands
of chocolate all over it. I think they generally use a piping bag for this, and here is why
— that blob is way too big. You're trying to make thin, crispy ribbons of chocolate,
not giant hard chunks. Yeah, learn from my mistake. Use a piping bag.
The chocolate solidifies instantly upon hitting the ice cream, and then you just stir to break
it up into thin little chips. We've obviously melted this a ton, so that'll need a couple
more freeze and stir cycles. Man, almond and chocolate is a great flavor combination.
In that goes to harden, and you can see what I mean about the color being more vivid when
frozen. Flavor-wise that might be my favorite of all of these, but they're all delicious.
The whole point of making ice cream at home instead of just buying it is to have fun,
and to let your creativity run wild. Chuck whatever you want in your ice cream and see
what works.
The still-freeze method offers an evening of good, wholesome fun for kids of all ages.
And unlike most science experiments, you get to eat this at the end. Just as you'll have
a website at the end of an evening with Squarespace. Seriously, you could easily get your site
built in-between the stirrings for one batch of ice cream.
The templates do most of the work for you. Just pick one that fits the purpose of your
site and replace all of their stock photos and words with your own. You can customize
from there. Move things around. Edit your images — there's a built-in image editor.
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one-stop shop. Thank you, Squarespace.
Now walk in your kitchen and make some ice cream. You probably have everything you need
already.