Week Nineteen: Mum knows best

I’ve said before, my entry into ice cream making happened mostly because my dad wanted to empty the house of some of the kitchen equipment that my mum had bought and then used maybe twice. My mum likes trying different things but not many of them stick. The ice cream machine came along at a fortunate time, I was recovering from a badly broken ankle and not long after I got the machine I developed pneumonia and had a subsequent long recovery from that, and it was difficult to participate in my primary hobbies, so a hobby I could do with minimal exertion and from my own kitchen was ideal. (I suspect this may have also been why I specifically was given the ice cream machine.) So I thank my mum - and my dad’s tidiness - for my ice cream.

The one thing my mum didn’t really do was actually make ice cream. No one in my family is particularly domestic, the only one I could imagine making ice cream would have been my grandma on my dad’s side, but ice cream wasn’t her vice - that was cheese, chocolate and marzipan. I can only remember my mum making ice cream once, and it was from the Ben & Jerry’s book, it was cookie dough at my request; I can’t remember exactly why but I can remember her swearing about it, so I can only assume it didn’t go well. It wasn’t made again. I was given that book along with the ice cream machine, along with the manual for the machine (which I bizarrely still have even after giving the machine back when I upgraded; interestingly, the manual I got with a different machine by the same manufacturer has completely different recipes.) In absence of any actual ‘just like mum made it’ ice cream recipes, I combined the two introductions to ice cream that she gave me and made vanilla ice cream per the original manual, with Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough. I don’t usually like giving recipes in active use, but I don’t mind too much here for two reasons: one of them is given away in a manual, and both of them are modified for my purposes.

Let’s start with the ice cream recipe. As it’s the version in the UK manual, it uses double cream - a wonderfully fatty cream that I believe exceeds the amounts of butterfat available in the US, at about 50% butterfat. The nice thing about making ice cream is, after making a few, you can look at the recipe and know when it won’t work. A ballpark estimate of what using double cream in this recipe would do gave me a fat level of about 25% from the cream alone, before adding the milk (the actual calculation worked out as just over 27.5% overall.) We know from experience that this level of fat is unpleasant, so I made it with whipping cream instead. I also changed some of the method and streamlined part of it, the method in the manual is odd and unnecessarily ‘bitty’ as my grandmother would have described it.

And then the cookie dough. I had no intention of making cookies, I just wanted the dough, so I didn’t need it to be able to rise. Personally, I have some taste sensitivities, including salt (I use less of it than the original recipe) and I can taste bicarbonate of soda even in small amounts; without the need to rise, I just didn’t need any bicarbonate of soda. Then there was the egg issue. As I said in the sherbert week, I don’t personally mind eating raw egg because eggs are pasteurised in the UK, but I know that isn’t the case everywhere. This may come as a surprise, I’m actually largely plant based in my diet for environmental reasons (although as my colleague points out, I already didn’t eat red meat, I hardly fly and I don’t have children so I was already fairly low carbon); when I decided to do this I allowed myself a few exceptions otherwise I knew I’d be miserable, those exceptions being ice cream would still use proper cream, when dining out I’d order what I wanted, and honey because more bees in the world is good not bad. Thanks to this, I actually have egg replacement strategies, so rather than make this cookie dough with egg, I used one of my replacements. I also replaced the nuts because yuck, nuts in cookies. Make sure you take my advice on how to get the cookie dough into the ice cream, having made it twice I suspect this is the part my mother swore about. Make sure you read the entire recipe first.

Cuisinart cookie dough ice cream

Ingredients

This is to make 650g of mixture, which sounds like a curiously specific amount; it’s the most I thought I could make in my machine and also leave ability to add cookie dough pieces. You can use the percentages to make the amount you want.

343.46g whipping (19% butterfat) cream (52.84%)

168.74g whole (3.7% butterfat) milk (25.96%)

129.35g caster sugar (19.9%)

8.45g vanilla extract (1.3%)

(195g of cookie dough pieces, 30% of the overall ice cream mixture weight, see below recipe)

Method

(I use a stand mixer with whisk attachment)

1. Put the cream and milk into a mixing bowl.

2. Whisk whilst adding the sugar gradually, and continue to whisk until the sugar is fully dissolved.

3. Optional - chill for several hours. (Optional because all the ingredients are cold and nothing needs to infuse.)

4. Just prior to churning, add the vanilla extract and whisk it fully in.

5. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping at just about soft serve texture. (Hint: if you have a choice of paddle, use the one with the biggest gaps in it.)

6. Add your cookie dough pieces and churn for an extra minute or two (or, in my case, when the paddle fully clogs up and it won’t churn anymore.)

7. Put into a container and put it in the freezer for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough pieces, modified

Ingredients

(This makes exactly the amount needed for 650g of ice cream mixture; I’d suggest make more, the temptation to eat it is high…)

3.73g ground flaxseed (1.401%)

15.1g water (7.743%)

39.73g unsalted butter, at room temperature (20.37%)

17.02g caster sugar (8.729%)

23.09g light brown sugar (11.84%)

1.32g vanilla bean paste* (0.6754%)

54.17g plain (all purpose) flour (27.78%)

1.04g salt (0.5317%)

40.81g dark chocolate chips (20.93%)

* I used vanilla bean paste almost accidentally - I made two batches and used up all my vanilla extract in the first one, but I had vanilla bean paste and read they can be substituted basically like for like. I found I preferred the texture of the dough with the paste, it has some extra ingredients that seem to stick the dough slightly more. If you don’t have vanilla bean paste and don’t want to buy it just for this, use vanilla extract.

Method

1. Mix the flaxseed and water in a small bowl, then put it into the fridge for at least five minutes.

2. Beat the sugars and butter together. (Unless you’re making a lot, just do it by hand.)

3. Add the flaxseed/water mixture and the vanilla bean paste, and mix well.

4. Sieve the flour and salt into the wet ingredients, and stir well until fully mixed in.

5. Add the chocolate chips and mix them in until roughly evenly distributed.

6. Chill the dough for several hours.

7. Roll small pieces of the dough into balls approximately 1cm/just under half an inch in diameter.

(I made mine a little big.)

8. Freeze the dough balls at least overnight; this is vital otherwise they won’t really mix in.

I’ll be fair to my mother: I swore about this too. It tastes nice, don’t misunderstand me, but to be honest for the amount of time and work it took I think I’d have been happy to just buy a tub of Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream (although I swear this one has far more cookie dough pieces, and the dough pieces have a lot more chocolate chips too.) I’ve also come to the conclusion that a) I like smooth textured ice creams and b) I’m not just saying this because ‘proper’ ingredients are part of my ice cream thing, I prefer using proper ingredients rather than extracts. I’ve done a few extracts now and I’m really looking forward to getting back to proper ingredients, which resumes from next week with another exploration of my start in ice creams.