Not only is homemade ice cream less expensive than store-bought brands, it's also more delicious, says chef Scott Swartz of The Culinary Institute of America. Additionally, it lets you be creative and mix in any flavor you like. Chef Swartz starts by demonstrating a simple vanilla ice cream base. He adds 1 1/2 cups of milk, 2 cups of cream, a tablespoon of vanilla, and 3/4 cup of sugar to a bowl. (It's best not to use all heavy cream when you're using an ice-cream machine, as it tends to get chunky.) He whisks the mixture until the sugar dissolves, then pours it into the bowl of an ice-cream maker. (You want to make sure the bowl has been frozen for at least 12 hours, though a full 24 hours is better.) He places the scraper inside the bowl, then places the top on the machine and starts the churning process. About 20 minutes later, the ice cream is finished. You can tell it's done by the increased volume and thickness. Right out of the bowl, it will be the consistency of soft-serve; if you want it more firm, simply put it in a covered container and let it set up in the freezer.
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Hi, I'm Chef Scott Swartz from the Culinary Institute of America, and I'm here to show you this kitchen basic: how to make ice cream.
Today we're going to make ice cream using an electric ice cream maker, and we're going to make a very simple vanilla ice cream. The advantage of using your own ice cream maker is it's much less expensive - and you get to play, and create flavors that you like.
We're going to show you a simple four-ingredient ice cream, and then we'll spin it and you'll see how easy it can be to make your own. We're going to take a cup and a half of milk. This recipe uses both cream and milk; with an ice cream maker, if you use straight cream, it gets too chunky. I've got two cups of cream here. Again, we could increase the cream quantity a little bit, but we do need the milk to balance it. I've got a tablespoon of Tahitian vanilla extract - if you're going to do something like this, you want the good stuff - and three quarters of a cup of sugar.
We're going to mix those ingredients together in a bowl, and what I'm really looking to do is dissolve the sugar. By dissolving the sugar, I'm going to get a less grainy ice cream. Once you've whisked this for about a minute and you know your sugar's dissolved, you're going to go over to your ice cream maker.
Your ice cream maker basically has four parts: the lid, the scraper which is going to churn it and keep the sides clean, the bowl - which should be frozen from 12 to 24 hours, the longer the better; at my house we actually store it in the freezer until we're ready to make ice cream - and then we've got the base, which is your motor. All these parts are very simple, it's very easy to clean, and all you have to do is put it back together.
We're going to take our ice cream base, as we said just four ingredients - milk , sugar, vanilla and cream - and pour it in. This is just one type of ice cream you can make. You can vary it if you're a chocolate person, you can swirl things into it, you can make frozen yogurts, you can even make sorbets in this same machine, very very simply. Then we're going to take our scraper and put that in, it fits right in easily, and we're going to slide the top on. Then turn it on, and we let this spin for approximately twenty minutes. When you're looking to see if your ice cream is done, you'll look inside and it's going to look like it's gotten thick.
It's been about twenty minutes, so we'll turn off the machine and remove our cover; remove our scraper, and you can see that beautiful ice cream sticking to it there. You can see how our ice cream is really nice and thick; it's got some body to it. We're going to take a little and see how it looks and how it tastes. It's nice and soft - it actually starts melting very quickly, because it hasn't set up firm yet. When we taste this, it's going to be like eating a soft-serve ice cream. You can see how easily it scoops. It melts instantly when it hits your mouth, just like a soft-serve ice cream would.
And that's how you make ice cream.