July 4, 2014
Rob
5

Recipe: Vanilla ice cream

This is an all-time favourite of mine! My ice cream machine was definitely a good investment since it allows me to make a great dessert any time I want for a very cheap price! Home-made ice cream is so good I can’t stop making it, especially in summer! 🙂

This is my first ice cream recipe on this blog and I couldn’t go more classic: vanilla ice cream.

Recipe-Vanilla-ice-cream-01

Making ice cream is not so different from making a flavoured custard sauce, but there are a few important ingredients and steps to remember:

  • Powdered milk is fundamental to add creaminess
  • Glucose or dextrose is needed to prevent crystallisation (otherwise the ice cream will be good the same day, but will become too hard and icy in the following days)
  • An ice cream stabiliser is recommendable to keep the final product creamy and soft
  • The custard must be chilled quickly after cooking and needs to rest 24 hours in the fridge before churning.

(Of course, without these “special” ingredients, you might achieve a pretty decent result anyway, but it will probably be way different from artisan ice cream.)

Recipe-Vanilla-ice-cream-05

This recipe,  inspired by Pierre Hermé, is very rich and creamy. If you want to follow his directions, let two vanilla beans steep in the milk for one day: as a result the ice cream has a fantastic and strong vanilla flavour (but for mere mortals like me, steeping the vanilla for 10 minutes gives an amazing result anyway).

This is a basic recipe which is good for virtually any kind of ice cream: so unleash your creativity and add some chocolate, pistachio paste, praline paste, tea bags or any other flavour you want! And why not serving it with chocolate chips, cookie crumbs or meringues? 🙂 Slurp!

 

Vanilla ice cream

Print recipe

Ingredients

280gWhole milk
15gGranulated sugar (for the milk)
25gDextrose (or 13g granulated sugar)
35gWhole milk powder
1/2 teaspoonIce cream stabiliser (e.g. carrageenan or guar gum - optional)
40gGranulated sugar (for the yolks)
2Egg yolks
2Vanilla beans (split in half)
120mlHeavy cream (cold)

Directions

1
Heat the milk, sugar, glucose and vanilla in a saucepan on medium heat, whisking regularly
2
When the mixture is lukewarm, add the milk powder and whisk
3
Mix the remaining part of sugar with the ice cream stabiliser
4
Whisk together the egg yolks with the sugar and ice cream stabiliser
5
When the milk is boiling, pour it in three times on the yolk mixture, whisking quickly and continuously to prevent curdling
6
Pour the mixture back into the saucepan on low heat and stir continuously with a spatula. Move the spatula back and forth gently and always in the same direction to avoid incorporating air.
7
At the beginning the mixture will be very liquid...
8
...then the air bubbles will disappear and the custard will become a darker yellow colour.
9
Continue stirring the custard until it reaches 82°C (pasteurisation temperature). Keep it at 82°C for a couple of minutes. In any case, the custard temperature should remain below 85°C to prevent the egg yolks from curdling (this means: absolutely DO NOT BOIL it!).
When the custard reaches the correct temperature, it will be sufficiently thickened and will coat the spatula or the back of a spoon.
10
To avoid using a thermometre, you can perform the finger test. The custard is ready when it is thickened enough to leave a path on the back of a spoon when a finger is drawn across.
11
Strain the custard into a clean bowl (important: do NOT put it back in the same bowl that contained the raw egg yolk mixture)
12
Pour the cold cream into the hot custard to cool it down
13
Place the bowl with the custard and cream onto an ice bath to cool down quickly. Stir with a clean spatula and turn the bowl frequently.
14
Let the custard reach at least 15°C or lower, then store for 24 hours in the fridge for maturation. Finally churn the custard sauce in an ice cream machine for around 20 minutes.

Note

  • Eggs are a potentially hazardous food with a high bacterial content, so they must be pasteurised by keeping the custard at 82°C for a couple of minutes in this recipe. This will kill all the bacteria in the custard. Any temperature above 85°C is risky as the yolks might start curdling.
  • The final custard with pasteurised eggs should not be poured in the container that contained the raw eggs, as this would make the pasteurisation useless.
  • The custard must be chilled quickly to prevent the proliferation of bacteria, which is highest at temperatures between 10°C and 60°C. To do this, prepare an ice bath with ice and cold water.
  • The atomised glucose is powdered glucose (and is different from glucose syrup), which is used in the recipe to prevent crystallisation and to make the ice cream creamier. For home made ice cream, you can definitely survive if you use dextrose. And let's be clear: you can even replace it with regular sugar (around 0.5g of sugar for each gram of atomised glucose).

More Posts Like This One