I bought an ice cream machine a couple years ago and have enjoyed trying new recipes. Can't say I have an all time favorite yet. But I have a wonderful book to recommend called The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz. His instructions on page 3 on how to make ice cream custard are worth the price of the book.

Here is a link that might be useful: The Perfect Scoop

Thanks, I checked it out. Watched a video on Williams-Sonoma earlier and the cook didn't use an ice bath to cool the mix down fast. That makes a lot of sense.

I'm curious to know if anyone has tried making ice cream out of goat's milk. I bought a container at Whole Foods made from goat's milk but they put a lot of egg in it which I didn't care for. Will any ice cream recipe work by simply substituting goat for cow's milk? I've been contemplating getting an ice cream attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer but don't want to spend the money if I can't experiment with other types of milk. They sell rice milk ice cream now and yesterday I bought 2 small containers of Hemp ice cream and coconut milk ice cream! Not in love with the coconut milk but I wasn't able to tell it came from a coconut (probably because I bought the chocolate flavor). I love that there are options now for ice creams made from sources other than cow! But that's store bought...now I want to know if will work making it myself. Timely question, I'm glad you brought the subject up...cuz baby it's hot outside and I want my ice cream!!

I make cheater ice cream. Take some frozen berries of your choice and put in blender. Add a bit of milk (any kind) to obtain desired consistency. It's lowfat and yummy.

This is my most favorite easy homemade ice cream recipe. I grew up on this, and I still love it!

Orange Sherbet

Ingredients
2 (14 ounce) cans sweetened condensed milk
6 (12 fluid ounce) cans or bottles orange-flavored carbonated beverage
1 (20 ounce) can crushed pineapple, with juice

Chill all ingredients in fridge overnight then freeze according to manufacturer's instructions. You might have to cut this down for the Cuisinart as I think it is smaller than the regular ice cream makers.

I also love fresh peach homemade ice cream!

We have a hand-crank Donvier we got when we were married in 1995 that is almost constantly in use from about the 4th of July to mid-September. (The brand-name one is overpriced. Get a clone, which can be had for under $20 on sale.) DH wants an electric and I may get him one for his birthday (which is 2 days after Christmas LOL) if end-of-summer sales yield any REALLY good prices on reliable machines. Here's the base recipe we use, from the Ben & Jerry's book... I don't think you could GET any simpler, and it's surprisingly good. We pretty much never use a custard base because our kitchen is not air conditioned, and diddling around making custard in a 90-odd degree kitchen is officially Not Worth It in our book.

For a 1 quart ice cream maker, combine 1 can sweetened, condensed milk (many of us remember it as "Eagle milk") with 2 cups light cream, a splash of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. Do NOT leave out the salt! Stir well, chill at least 2 hours before putting in the ice cream maker. You can substitute full-fat ("cream top") vanilla yogurt for half the cream but it doesn't really save you much calorically, just does interesting things to the flavor and can make you feel a little virtuous LOL! Lower-fat yogurts give a strange chalky texture and unsweetened yogurt makes for very sour product. (Found from unpleasant experience that just chucking a quart of yogurt straight from the container into the ice cream maker, no matter how yummy it is normally, does not make nice frozen yogurt, oh no not at all!) There's a simple plain base, now start playing...

A super easy way to get a delicious fruity flavor ice cream is to substitute 1 cup of a good strong jam for 1 cup of the cream. (I don't recommend doing both jam and yogurt and eliminating all the cream. The result came out... the only word I can find for it is "stretchy".) The jam concentrates the fruit's flavor; warm "seedy" jams like raspberry or blackberry until they're liquidy and push them through a strainer if you don't want to be picking seeds out of your teeth for days. If you want fruit pieces, line a cookie sheet with the nonstick foil or baking parchment (or a Silpat if you're blessed with one), spread out a layer of finely chopped fruit with the pieces not touching, or minimally touching, and freeze rock solid. Add the fruit pieces at the very end of churning.

Toast any nuts you wish to add for a stronger, "nuttier" flavor; and grating frozen chocolate bars on the largest holes of a grater (use an oven mitt to hold the chocolate so your body heat doesn't melt it) gives a better result IMO than using chocolate chips, even the mini kind. If you want to use something like butterscotch chips, freeze them and break them up in small batches in a food processor on "pulse". Good use for one of those mini-chopper types. Remember that your liquid ice cream/sorbet/yogurt mixture has to be almost sickeningly-sweet in its unfrozen state to taste "normal" as a finished product - the cold numbs your taste buds so all the flavors have to be STRONG.

Oh, and filling the churning chamber more than about 2/3 full, 3/4 at the most, can be a recipe for a Big Sticky Mess. So don't do it.

Honey-sweetened ice cream does not store well more than 24 hours - it gets crumbly and weird-textured, so if you want to do something with honey, have enough people around to scarf it down within hours of curing. Alcohol will interfere in the solidifying process so if you really load it up even with an overnight cure you may not get more than a "soft serve" texture.

We bought a whole slew of nice little (not quite 1/2 cup) lidded plastic containers into which we portion the ice cream while it's still in the "soft serve" state. Pop them in the freezer and in 4 hours it's solidified enough to have the proper ice cream "mouthfeel", although I like 8 hours' curing time. If we don't pre-portion it DH will go WAY overboard!

Oh, and the famous Mark Bittman/New York Times "eggless ice cream" was IMNSHO utterly REVOLTING.

We don't make icecream often. Since we are trying to eat healthy, it is more of a treat for us, and usually something we make only when we have someone else over (to help eat it LOL). I still prefer the old fashioned churn -well electric, not crank, freezers to the new fancier models. I also don't care for it after it's been refrozen. We like good old vanilla with fresh fruit - peach is a favorite. I'm also partial to peppermint icecream, but most people aren't.

I also won't make icecream with eggs in it.

My mom use to make a yummy chocolate marshmallow icecream. She also used to do a good toasted coconut and butter pecan.

Haven't made any yet this year. Good idea for next weekend - ice cream and a few friends!

tina

A number of food bloggers participated in a virtual ice cream social this weekend. Found a recipe on one that I think I'd like to try. Dh loves coffee ice cream which means he'll eat most of it. ;)

Here is a link that might be useful: Mocha Latte Ice Cream

Oh Tina remember making homemade ice cream on holidays? Using all that salt and big huge huk of ice and people taking turns turning the crank? Those were the days and such good ice cream.

My sister makes a coconut ice cream (which I don't have the recepe) to die for. Tastes like it comes from a fancy wancy restaurant, love it.

.....Jane

I don't know about Coconut ice cream but when I make a coconut cream pie I don't buy the sweetened can I buy the unsweetened one and use Bakers coconut, it is so fresh and good. They sell the semi fresh in the freezer but I have never used that one.

I grew up making hand cranked ice cream, where everyone took turns cranking the machine. One year it leaked and the ice cream was salty!! Yuck! My parents used their things until the living end.

Yes Jane - especially 4th of July! Never did the hunk of ice though - just bagged ice. Which is what hubby and I still do - with an electric freezer - no hand cranking (but that makes good ice cream!). Rock salt and ice.

I love coconut ice cream. I also like coffee flavor too (although I don't drink coffee!) and that looks like a good recipe Natal - the pecans and chocolate pieces would be yummy. Fattening, but yummy! LOL

Jane, you also brought back a memory for me. When I was young, in the summers our church would have ice cream parties on a Sunday evening during the summer. People brought their ice cream freezers and there were so many flavors and combinations. What fun!

tina

I just can't consider a smoothie to be equivalent to ice cream. To me they're completely different creatures and not interchangeable. There's also no reason that a homemade ice cream has to be fattening unless you choose to make it that way by piling in the egg yolks and heavy cream and tons of sugary ingredients, and as I noted above, portion control is so much easier. (The little cups we use are labeled as holding 4 ounces, but we don't fill them all the way so we get a perfect 8 servings. I'd say our portions are closer to 3 fluid ounces, and interestingly once the little cup is finished neither of us has any urge to go get another). It IS possible to make very low-fat, low-sugar, salt-free frozen desserts, we'll probably fiddle around with some of those just for the fun of it but I'd honestly rather just have a little bit of the real thing than larger amounts of ersatz versions.

flyingflower, I'd look for an inexpensive Donvier clone to play with some different cow's-milk substitutes before coughing up for the pricier machine. A few weeks ago we made an "ice cream" with reduced-fat coconut milk, aiming to more or less copy the vegan coconut "ice cream" served at a local Thai restaurant. It wasn't bad at all but it had absolutely no coconut flavor (pretty sure they added coconut flavoring; there were no coconut bits) and the texture was rather lacking - it needed a better emulsifier. The proprietor said that regular coconut milk created an inedibly greasy end product, it had to be the "light" kind (although that was the only kind they used at that restaurant anyway, she showed me the can). A lot of people use bananas as the emulsifier in eggless ice creams but even if the banana flavor is covered by other flavors I still get that odd sticky banana-y mouthfeel.

Can't stand the taste of goat's milk so I can't help you with any specifics on that point, but I'm sure if you google "goat's milk ice cream recipes" you'll get at least a few thousand recipes. :-) (If you leave off "recipes" you get a million pages about LaLoo's.) I remember when I was a kid my parents were friends with a couple who raised goats because one of them could not consume cow's milk (although they also raised cows and sold lots of cow's milk) and made a great deal of goat's milk ice cream, mostly in fruit flavors from fruits grown on their farm like strawberries and raspberries. I remember it as being pretty sour compared to regular ice cream.

We had two of those huge ice-and-salt ice-cream makers when I was young. The hand-crank one kicked the bucket, so to speak, the year of the Bicentennial - I remember that because it ruined the ice cream and all the kids were really mad because we'd spent an eternity cranking AFTER putting up with being in the parade on a horribly hot day, we'd all just barely gotten over the chicken pox, and no ice cream! (Both sides of my family were of the opinion that the purpose of children was free labor.) It was replaced with an electric version. It went years between uses because it was so messy, slow and tedious; I inherited it when I moved out and I dragged it around for years without its ever being used. It finally ended up at Goodwill. For the nostalgic types who still prefer to join the 21st century, Cuisinart makes a 2-quart wood-finish electric model.

Of the 3 flavors I've tried so far dh says this is the best. I omitted the pecans and used dark chocolate instead of semi-sweet.

Mocha Latte ice cream...

{{gwi:689712}}

Natal, I am coming over so save some for me, OK?