Giving it a Whirl

Making homemade ice cream has been part of my family's tradition for many years, but for some reason hasn't been part of the married Hayley's tradition.

Sad. Must put it on the 101 list to remedy that.

Before The Boy and I moved overseas, my parent gifted us with a White Mountain hand-crank ice cream maker. The hand crank feature was mostly about living overseas, where electric voltage (and supply) would vary. But even in the United States, hand cranked ice cream produces some of the smoothest, tastiest ice cream in the same amount of time and effort as an electric-powered machine.

This weekend, we drug the ice cream maker out of its box and whipped up a batch of plain vanilla ice cream.

Start simple, I always say.

The Boy worked the hand crank and I sat on the machine to hold it down. (This allowed The Boy to exert less effort while churning.)

After about 25 minutes, we had wonderful soft-serve vanilla ice cream - and that's when the fun began. We divided the ice cream into separate containers and added toppings to create our own custom blends.

Our first efforts produced:

Banana Split - crushed pineapple, sliced strawberries, mashed bananas, toasted coconut and chopped walnuts.

S'mores - crushed Digestive biscuits (these hold their texture better than graham crackers), melted dark chocolate chips and mini marshmallows

Fruit blend - sliced strawberries, mashed bananas and chopped pecans

Mud Pie - mocha powder, Kahlua (you could also used cooled brewed coffee) and crushed Oreo cookies.

They were all delicious. It's impossible, in fact, to point to one that's a favorite.

We have learned some things for the next round of ice cream making:

• We should run all fruit through the food processor first, to allow it to mix in nicely instead of becoming frozen ice cubes of fruit within the ice cream.
• We need to add a stabilizer of sorts to help the ice cream stay "scoopable" with a smooth texture. We noticed that the Mud Pie stayed that way. A bit of research online revealed it's because of the Kahlua. Apparently alcohol is a common stabilizer in commercially produced ice creams. I've found some non-alcohol stabilizer options, including actual "stabilizers" that I can purchase from pastry supply companies online and unflavored gelatin.
• It's better to work in a large bowl to stir the added ingredients, then pour into my freezer containers.
• Adding melted chocolate to ice cream is a bad idea, because it becomes like a "hard crack" chocolate. I suppose that's fine if you want a really crisp chocolate in your ice cream, but it's not like a fudge ribbon. We'll have to experiment to figure out how to fix that.

 Sounds like the Hayleys are going to have fun making ice cream this summer!