Week One: Basics

On a reddit called 52 Weeks of Ice Cream, the aim is (unsurprisingly) to make 52 ice creams in 2024, following a weekly theme. As I’m essentially an ice cream tinkerer and newly armed with a fancy ice cream machine, this appealed greatly, and so here we are. 


The first theme is ‘basics’ and what would be more basic than making what is literally my base ice cream? It only uses three ingredients (and two of those are variants of each other) and instructions that are essentially ‘weigh’ and ‘mix’. I made 600g but I do everything in ice cream by percentages, and I’ve given those too so you can make any amount you like.


Ingredients:


340.2g single (19% fat) cream (56.7%)

139.2g whipping (39% fat) cream (23.2%)

120.6g caster sugar* (20.1%)

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1gbINzaHRrRuwpEGUKoYwEB9VCO1VW799

* Caster sugar seems to be a UK thing; it’s very fine granulated sugar, different to powdered/confectioner’s/icing sugar in that it has nothing else added to it; granulated sugar will work instead, or could be ground down to make DIY caster sugar.


Method:

(I use a stand mixer with a balloon whisk; you could whisk by hand, or with a handheld electric whisk on a low speed.)


1. Put both creams into the mixer bowl.

2. Slowly whisk the cream whilst adding the sugar gradually.

3. Once all the sugar is added, continue to whisk for about 30 seconds or until the sugar is well mixed in.

4. Chill the mixture for several hours, overnight if possible.

5. Whisk on a low speed again just prior to churn.

6. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions.

7. Put ice cream into a container; to achieve a hard ice cream texture, put in the freezer for at least several hours.

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1_Pk6CYq25t4Z3tq7KyUcr4ZGlb1toqxI

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1fThepsNMbrbasOepZrOzhC5GAAH1ztj2


And that is how I make what I consider to be my easiest nice ice cream, and also I use this recipe as the base for all my other non-custard ice creams.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week Eight: With a Twist

Image
I was initially not sure what to do for With a Twist week. The first thought was some form of drink/cocktail based ice cream, taking ‘with a twist’ as in ‘scotch on the rocks.’ But, I don’t drink, and none of the classic drinks that come with a twist (a twist being a small slice of fruit, usually citrus of some sort) had easy non-alcoholic versions; they tend to be very alcohol based, unlike something like a piña colada which essentially turns into a pineapple coconut milkshake. There was an excellent cocktail bar in Wrexham (yes, the city where Ryan Reynolds owns the football team) called Voodoo Moon that made the best virgin piña coladas, and everything really - I’m still sad it’s closed now. I digress. No cocktail based ice cream. So instead I looked at other uses of ‘ with a twist’, and landed on the Todd Rundgren album With A Twist, bossa nova style versions of his previous songs, and I thought yes. Brazil.  (I promise this becomes relevant in a minute.) We tend to think of ve...
Read more

Week Twenty-Five: Summer

First of all, I will confess I had to cheat this one a little bit: I’ve gone away for a fortnight and would have been unable to make this ice cream fully within week twenty-five, so I churned it the day before and just photographed it during week twenty-five. And I’m going to have to pull out the stops to get week twenty-six done during its week too! When I think of summer, I think of feeling trapped inside my house because I neither want to get too hot nor encounter insects that may mean me harm. I like the theory of bees and have even visited a bee farm, but the reality is they scare me a bit because my buzz sensors go off and alert me that it could be a wasp before I see that it’s a bee. And, as I tell my cats, we don’t play with wasps (they don’t always listen to me…) From bees, I then, naturally, thought of honey.  Honey is a type of sugar; more accurately it’s made of sugars, mostly fructose with a little sucrose. I’ve written a little on different types of sugar before when ...
Read more