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There's a lot of good methods for making ice cream without an ice cream maker. I've tried
many of them, but this is my favorite: the two bowls method. It's pretty easy, it requires
no special equipment, and it yields at least a couple pints of fantastic ice cream.
We're going to start with an ice cream in its easiest, purist form: just sugar, cream
and milk. No eggs, no pre-cooking. Here in the U.S. we call this a Philadelphia-style
ice cream. I do think you can significantly improve it by trading in the milk for evaporated
milk. The higher protein content in this gets you a smoother texture. Some people add dried
milk powder to their ice cream mix, that's just a different route to the same destination.
Here's a big, 10 quart metal bowl — 9.5 liters. I don't think the material really
matters. It can be anything. It's just gotta be big. Inside is a 4 quart metal bowl — just
under 4 liters, and I do think metal is best for the inner bowl. It needs to be something
thermally conductive. You can do this with lots of different bowl sizes, but I think
the outer bowl should be at least twice as big as the inner bowl.
I don't think this next thing is essential, but it helps if you chuck these bowls and
your ingredients into the freezer for like 10-15 minutes before you start. OK, outer
bowl comes out, and we need to fill it halfway up with ice. People say it has to be crushed
ice. I have not found that to the case. I think normal ice cubes work just fine.
Into this ice we need to stir a bunch of salt. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice,
which will result in supercooled water wrapping around our inner bowl, chilling our ice cream.
I'm just using normal kosher salt, because that's what I have, and I'm eyeballing roughly
one part salt to four parts ice.
There is a product called ice cream salt you can buy. Some say it works better because
the grains are bigger which helps them disperse more evenly in the ice. I don't really understand
that — I just know that this works, too. I think the main reason to use ice cream salt
is that it's cheaper, because it's not intended for human consumption. It's full of impurities,
which is fine because we're not putting it in the actual ice cream. Hence cheaper. But
I'm not making ice cream every day. I'm just doing this for fun, so I'm just stirring in
the salt that I have.
I'll nest the inner bowl into the ice, and then pour in this whole pint of cream. That's
two cups, 475 ml. We'll follow that with one cup, 235 ml of evaporated milk, or regular
milk. Any mixture of some kind of cream and some kind of milk will generally get you into
the range of fat-to-water ratios that work well for ice cream.
Then sugar. 3/4 cup or 150 g would be a pretty standard amount for this much dairy.
You could stop there — that's sweet cream ice cream, but I'm gonna give it a huge glug
of vanilla. If you were adding chocolate or any other flavorings, you would do that now.
If you have chunks you want to put in, you generally wait until right at the end, after
you've churned it.
Now we'll put a hand mixer in there and beat on the lowest setting for maybe 8-10 minutes.
It's a long time. This is the tedious part, but it's not so bad. It's certainly nothing
compared to old-fashioned hand churning. Try to work the edges with the beaters. After
a while, some of the mixture might want to stick and freeze to the walls of the bowl.
We need to make sure we get it off.
Could you do this with a whisk? Sure, go for it, Popeye.
After a few minutes this will start to get really fluffy, like whipped cream. In fact,
it is whipped cream. A traditional ice cream churn spins much slower, and therefore does
not incorporate nearly as much air up front as this method does.
Indeed, if you were to taste this now, it'd taste like Cool Whip. But don't worry, this
is just phase one. After upwards of 10 minutes, I can feel the ice has melted a lot and my
mixture doesn't seem to be getting any stiffer, or colder, or aerated. It's done all it can
do for now.
Now comes the genius step that I learned from Faith Durand at The Kitchn: The whole rig
goes in the freezer. The whole thing. If it doesn't fit in your freezer, you can just
put in the inner bowl, and then recharge the outer bowl with fresh ice before phase two,
which is to take this out of the freezer after about an hour in there, and then beat it again
for just a few minutes.
You'll see it immediately deflate into something that actually looks like ice cream. No, this
is not how ice cream is normally made, but gain, different routes to the same destination.
You might need to use a spoon to scrape any frozen stuff off the walls of the bowl. We
want to spread that cold evenly through the whole mixture. I suspect what we're doing
here is using the ice crystals that've formed in the freezer to pop all of the excess bubbles
we had in there, while at the same time we're breaking those big crystals down into smaller
ones that'll be smoother on the tongue.
If you didn't do this inside the ice bowl, the ice cream would melt way too fast, and
indeed, it is starting to visibly melt after about three minutes of beating, so we've done
all we can do in there. Time to act fast.
Pour this into some lidded, freezer-safe container. I got a little over a liter — or a quart
of ice cream, and this is a one-quart container, so I'm just gonna eat the extra soft-serve
right now. Get this into the freezer as fast as possible, and let it harden — some people
say overnight, I say 24 hours is better.
If you don't het it harden long enough, it might look and feel frozen, but it'll melt
really fast in the bowl. This has hardened for 24 hours and it's perfect. One reason
to make ice cream at home is that it's so rare to buy a product this pure — it's just
three or four ingredients and it tastes just so simple and good. I think the texture is
right up there with any traditionally churned ice cream.
Gotta get some sprinkles because I am a child. Now, that basic procedure should work with
any ice cream base recipe you want to use, and let's do another one right now. Let's
do a French-style ice cream, which is actually a frozen custard. I'm separating out six egg
yolks.
That's enough whites for me to actually use for something, so I'll save those. Other than
the yolks, our ingredients are the same. 3/4 cup of sugar, but split. I'll whisk like half
of that into the eggs. The sugar helps break them up and get them smooth, and it probably
helps on a chemical level to keep them from curdling later on.
Alright, in a little pot, I'll dump my remaining sugar and my pint of cream, and I'll bring
that to a simmer. Oh, and a pinch of salt really improves just about any ice cream.
When this is simmering, I'll slowly drizzle it into my eggs, whisking to keep them from
curdling, and now back into the pot this goes to simmer for a few minutes until it seems
to thicken a bit.
Off the heat it comes, and I'll put in my vanilla and my cup of cold milk. Yeah, it's
just regular milk — we've got plenty of protein from the yolks. Some people would
cook the milk with the custard, but I think putting cold milk in now helps to cool this
down faster.
We'll strain this into another bowl — straining is not necessary, but you can see all the
little chunkies in there. We need to cool this all the way down before we churn it — you
gotta cook your custard many hours in advance, which is why French-style ice cream is bigger
deal to make.
As I said, I think the main reason to make ice cream at home is just for fun. But another
reason is if you have something really special to put inside your ice cream, and I have these
beautiful peaches. These are from a tree my friends Heidi and Kris planted at their house.
Absolutely beautiful.
I'm gonna peel those peaches. You don't have to peel them, but peach skin kinda taste papery
in ice cream, and I'll just fillet the meat off the pits. This would be like three or
four normal grocery-store-sized peaches worth. You could puree all that, but I want perceivable
chunks, so I'll chop it up and then scatter on some sugar and a little lime juice — the
acid will keep the fruit from turning brown as we just let this sit here and let the sugar
break everything down. After maybe an hour, I can smash that with a fork, and that looks
really good.
Chunks of fruit any bigger than a coarse grind like this will freeze solid and hard inside
ice cream, like little pebbles. In that goes to chill, and sometime before we churn, we
need to take that peach pulp and squeeze as much juice as we can into the ice cream mix.
We need to churn it with most of the water already inside it, otherwise this peach juice
could freeze hard and crunchy.
Alrighty, again, we'll chill the whole rig for 10-15 minutes. Time to fill up the big
bowl with ice, and look at that, my refrigerator can crush its own ice. Crushed ice has more
surface area, so it makes better contact with the salt and the inner bowl, but I don't think
it makes that big of a difference.
Stir in roughly one part salt to four parts ice, nest in the inner bowl, and get beating
for about 10 minutes. I should say, my recipe here is calibrated to the size of my bowls.
This is the maximum quantity I can make with bowls this size. If your bowls are smaller,
you would need to scale down the recipe accordingly.
Alright, that seems as cold and fluffy as its gonna get. Whole rig goes in the freezer
again. An hour later, we'll beat it again for a few minutes and deflate it. When it
seems like it's starting to melt, stop, and this is when you can stir in any chunks without
interfering with the freezing or aerating processes. I'm stirring in my peach solids,
but you could do chocolate chips, or cookie crumbs — go nuts. I'm getting like three
pints there because of the extra mass of the peaches. I'll let those harden in the freezer
for a day, and there it is — a Georgia June in a bowl, straight from the tree to my mouth.
Absolutely delicious.
A little cherry on top, and ahhhh, party foul.
That French-style ice cream base is noticeably denser and smoother than the Philadelphia-style,
but it's a lot more work and I'm not even sure if I prefer the result. Again, you can
churn any kind of ice cream you want using this method that is almost as simple and easy
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peaches. Let's look at that tree one more time.