Ice Cream
I have in my possession what I consider to be the best Ice cream recipe book in the world. ICES, The Definitive Guide, by Caroline Liddell and Robin Weir.
I highly recommend any one remotely interested in eating ice cream to get hold of the book, they even goes into the history of Ice cream which is extremely interesting as it is believed that ice cream was invented way before the refrigerator. In the old days they used the science of the Endothermic effect of salt on ice, which means that putting various salts on Ice depresses the freezing point of the ice mixture and makes it possible to transfer the cold by conduction from the ice to elsewhere. Obviously there is a lot more to it than that. The first piece of real evidence of ice cream originated in China during the T’ang period (A.D. 618-907). But you really need to read their book to find out more and if your into science there’s a lot of that to.
Here is a basic Vanilla Ice cream recipe from the book, which can be adapted to make many other flavours.
Milk x 300ml or 1 ¼ cups
Vanilla Bean x 1
Granulated sugar 100g
Egg Yolks x 3
Whipping/ heavy cream x 250ml 1 cup
Makes about 800ml
Cut open the vanilla bean and put in a pan with the milk and half the sugar, and warm to just below boiling point.
Beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar preferably with an electric hand mixer, if you don’t have one be prepared for wrist ache. Beat until the mixture is pale and thick enough to makes shapes in.
Bring the milk back to boiling point and then slowly add to the egg sugar mix, beating as you go.
Now you can also add the cream.
The hard part starts now as you need to make the mix into a custard, obviously it’s not hard if you get it right but it is very easy to overcook the mix and scramble it, (just like sweet scrambled eggs) this however doesn’t make nice ice cream.
The best way to avoid this is to not cook over direct heat but over boiling water, so get a pan of boiling water on the go and put you bowl with the custard mix on top of it. Now keep stirring until the mixture become thick, just like CUSTARD!
When this is done you need to leave to cool before churning in an ice cream machine.
Once cool and in the churner the custard normally takes about half an hour to become ice cream.
This is the stage where you can add other things, such as chocolate chips, cookie dough, fruits, jams etc to make it more interesting.
Once finished you need to transfer to a plastic ice cream tub and freeze, I normally allow it to deep freeze overnight before attempting to serve otherwise it’s more like Mr Whippy.
EXPENSIVE VANNILA!!
Yes vanilla pods are extremely expensive in Europe for about two in the supermarket it’s about 5 Euros! I know WOW, so if you want you can use vanilla extract, obviously it won’t taste so amazing but if you adding another ingredient like chocolate chips, you may as well.
