My new favorite way of making ice cream at home is with dry ice, frozen, solid carbon
dioxide. You can buy this in supermarkets these days, in the United States at least. You just
have to ask for it. You have to go up front. They keep it in a special cooler for two reasons. One,
they don't sell it to kids because it's dangerous and, two, it needs to be kept in that special
cooler because the second it comes out, it's going to start to sublimate. That is to say,
it is going to turn directly from a solid to a gas. It skips the liquid phase. It's constantly
off-gassing. It's constantly shrinking, and it'll be gone by tomorrow. So you got to buy it the day
that you plan to use it and try not to touch it with your hands. It'll give you frostbite.
Other thing is that you want to work with it in a well-ventilated space. I have a big kitchen.
I've got some windows open, and that's fine. If you have a small kitchen with no windows, maybe
you don't want to do this because carbon dioxide is not toxic in the way that carbon monoxide is,
but if a lot of carbon dioxide gas builds up in your environment, it's just going to
crowd out all of the oxygen and you could totally suffocate. That's the thing. This more commonly
happens in cars or closed environments, but in the kitchen, it's worth being worried about.
So if you have windows, open them up. Now what we need to do is convert this
into snow. Drop it in there, close it up, and then pulse until I get a fine powder. Now you
could do this by just wrapping up the dry ice in a kitchen towel and then smashing it with a hammer,
but then you'd probably get some big chunks of dry ice. If they're really big chunks,
then they might not all melt or sublimate inside the ice cream, and you could end up touching your
tongue with big chunks of dry ice, which could potentially give you a little frostbite on your
tongue. So I definitely recommend doing this in the food processor to get a nice fine sand.
There we go, completely powderized. Perfect. Now what we got to do is we got to make our
ice cream base, and this will work with any ice cream base, dairy, non-dairy, cooked,
raw, doesn't matter. I'm just going to do a really, really simple base. Four parts cream,
parts by volume in this instance. Four parts cream to two parts milk. Straight cream would
just be too much fat. Then between one and two parts sugar, depending on how sweet you like it.
I guess I'm going to do, I don't know, one and a half parts sugar in there. Splash of vanilla
or any other flavoring that you want. Chunks, no chunks. Literally whatever you want, this method
will work fine for it. This I'm simply going to stir up. The sugar won't even dissolve all the
way. I just need to get it dispersed evenly, and then we can make it into ice cream. This is going
to happen so fast, you won't believe it. I think the best way to do this is that
everybody who's going to have ice cream should get one of these, a nice big metal mixing bowl,
something that looks bigger than it needs to be in order to hold your portion. Metal or plastic. You
wouldn't want to do this in glass or ceramic because it could crack from thermal shock.
Pour a cup of this in here for one person, one serving. Then think of this dry ice snow
as an ingredient. It's cold. Add cold one spoonful at a time and mix it in.
Then you can do this with a hand whisk, but it's way easier with electric beaters. Just
beat it in. See, this is already a blast. This is so much fun. The one thing you can see is
that it's literally boiling up. The carbon dioxide is turning into a gas and bubbling out. If I was
doing this in a smaller bowl, it would boil over, and it would get all over your hands.
There's stuff in here that's dangerously cold. You wouldn't want that to happen. So just go
one spoonful at a time, and do it in a bowl that seems too big for the job. You don't want to do
this too much at once because you put in too much, it'll just lock up solid, and you'll have to wait
for it to melt before you can mix it up. Look at that. It's like we're making a
monster movie in the '30s. Give it a taste. Mmm, delicioso helado.
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Then as soon as it looks like ice cream, it's done. This needs a little more cold. As you mix
it, you're not just spreading around the cold, you are also whipping in some air,
which is a crucial ingredient in any ice cream. There you go, instant,
beautiful, soft serve texture. Look at that. Here's the thing that's really neat about it.
It tastes different. It is slightly carbonated. The dry ice snow here is not just cold, and it's
also an ingredient that stays inside the finished mixture. What happens is you get a little bit of
a residue of carbonic acid inside here. It's got this little kind of tang, little bit of
acidity to it, and it's a little bit fizzy. It has an effervescence to it. What is amazing
to me about it is that it tastes like a Coke float, like an ice cream float inside Coca-Cola.
It tastes like Coca-Cola. I suspect that much of the taste of Coca-Cola is just
the combination of carbonic acid and sugar. Now here's the thing. If it ever starts melting
on you, it's no problem. Just put in a little bit more snow. You can bring it right back again.
Then if you want more of a hard ice cream vibe, you simply transfer this
into something in the freezer and leave it there overnight. Then it'll look like this.
Let's say we wanted to do a more interesting flavor. We can just add flavors straight
in here without even washing the bowl. I'm just going to put in, I don't know,
tablespoon of cocoa powder. Give my base a stir to get the sugar redistributed as some of it is
settled on the bottom. Pour some of that in. Cocoa powder can be a little bit hard to make
disperse in cold liquid. See, you just got to beat it. Eventually, it'll soak in there.
Good enough. All right, time to just start putting in a spoonful of cold at a time. It's so awesome
and it's instant. Other ways of making ice cream take a long time. This is instant.
There, now that it's chocolate, you can actually have the color contrast to see those little clumps
of dry ice snow that are in there. You really want to get those mixed in well and broken up
because you don't want those clumps hitting your tongue. They could potentially hurt your skin.
All right, now I think I'm going to go some chunks this time. I
got some white chocolate chips. Nice color contrast. Good for TV. Stir those in. Now
you can see I put a little bit too much cold in there. It locked up on me a little bit.
That's okay. You can just let this sit for a couple of minutes, warm up, maybe
put in a little more base if it's tasting too chocolatey. There you go. Look at that ice cream.
It looks like frosting, but it's not. It's ice cream, and it's so good.
There's the method. Have fun with it, and don't hurt yourself. Okay?