20 Totally Insane Homemade Ice Cream Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret ingredient to ice cream? ›

It's the fat. The milk fat in ice cream is mostly what gives ice cream that creamy rich taste and feeling in your mouth. The creamiest ice creams have about 16% fat and the least creamy have about 10% fat.

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:

Mix ½ cup sugar or 1/3 cup sugar and 3 tablespoons corn syrup 1 teaspoon flour and a few grains salt. Add to milk and stir until thickened. Cover and cook ten minutes. Beat 1 egg yolk slightly, add a portion of the hot milk, return to double boiler and stir and cook one minute.

For the first recipe, I use just three ingredients – heavy cream, condensed milk, and vanilla extract. It's the easiest recipe and the best one to start with if you're new to homemade ice cream. This ice cream is best to make with heavy whipping cream with 36% to 40% fat content.

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.

In addition to being an emulsifier, egg yolks serve a second purpose: they thicken pre-churned ice cream base, which creates a creamier mouthfeel in the final product.

Adding a bit of hard alcohol like vodka, tequila, or whiskey—all of which run around forty percent alcohol—to a frozen dessert helps prevent big ice crystals from forming in the mixture, resulting in a softer texture.

The most common ones used in ice creams are guar gum, cellulose gum and carob bean gum. They are used to reduce ice crystal growth, deliver flavour cleanly, increase smoothness, body and creaminess and slow down melting. They also help hold the air bubble structure together and give the ice cream a better texture.

Most ice cream experts agree that unopened commercial ice cream stored in the coldest part of your office freezer can last about two to four months (homemade ice cream made without preservatives lasts about one month).

Almost 70 years ago, ice cream was made in a hand-cranked maker that was a wooden bucket, a metal container, paddles inside the container and a hand crank and gear piece on top. Ice and rock salt was poured around the metal container inside the wooden bucket.

Does homemade ice cream need eggs? ›

You can make tasty ice cream without them, but there's a reason that almost every recipe published in the last 50 years calls for them. Here's why: After water, egg yolks are mostly fat and protein. Fat, which freezes differently and less hard than water, makes ice cream soft and creamy.

It's all about the flavor. Homemade ice cream, without artificial ingredients, fake thickeners, or unnatural stabilizers to keep it "fresh" for weeks (or months!) in the grocery store freezer, is amazingly flavorful and actually fresh tasting. It's true.

The total cost of the ingredients comes to about $15.00. 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.

Fat. A great ice cream owes its smooth, creamy mouthfeel to fat, which helps keep ice crystals small. As Bauer explains, fat is also extraordinarily effective at carrying flavors, so when ice cream melts in your mouth, you are hit with the taste of your ingredients.

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!

By binding with liquids, sugar molecules prevent an ice cream base from fully freezing into crunchy ice. That is, the more sugar you add, the softer and less icy your batch will be. The kind of sugar you add also matters.