Homemade Ice Cream

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! I don't know if I would actually "scream," but I certainly throw fits when someone else eats the last serving and will drive to Publix at ten at night if I'm having a mint chocolate craving, so I certainly love the stuff. It's a family trait, really - my father has a serving of ice cream every night before bed (and he's thin as a rail, go figure) and my brother thinks nothing of destroying an entire Ben & Jerry's pint in one sitting. Given the amount of ice cream consumed at my house, plus a desire to focus on food with natural, pronounce-able ingredients and without laundry lists of preservatives and additives, I finally bit the bullet and bought an ice cream maker! The Cuisinart ICE-21 Frozen Yogurt-Ice Cream & Sorbet Maker, to be precise. And man, was that money well spent.

We started with vanilla, the most basic ingredient in the included recipe book. Instead of a entire cup of whole milk, I subbed in half a cup of almond milk. Mixing the milks, sugar, salt, and cream took about five minutes with a whisk, and after sitting overnight in the fridge and a mere 15 minutes in the machine, look what we had!

Homemade goodness

The ice cream was absolutely delicious. It was sweet, creamy, and even better than store-bought, in my opinion. The consistency isn't as hard as the stuff in cartons, but if you prefer it that way, just scoop the ice cream out of the mixer, place it in an airtight container in the freezer, and wait a couple of hours. We didn't have the patience for that though, so into our mouths it went! I hadn't even finished making the last serving before the first person was buzzing around looking for seconds - pft, like there were any.

The Cuisinart is really a great machine. The bowl is double-insulated with liquid in the middle, so it has to be frozen before the mixture is poured in (in our fridge, it didn't even take six hours to do the trick). We just turned it on and went about our business - you can definitely hear the engine running, but it isn't loud enough to make you reach for a pair of earplugs or anything, and my mom was able to hold a conversation in the next room, which is open to the kitchen, just fine. I actually found the hum oddly comforting, but maybe that's just because I knew what it was saying . . . ice cream is coming! ice cream is coming!

It's actually really fun to watch it work, too. The paddle stays in position while the bowl rotates around, so you could see the ice cream being summoned from the sweet liquidity depths of the milk and cream mixture. Once the liquid was gone, you just pull out the paddle and eat!

All ready to be scooped out

The possibilities are endless. I want to try substituting all the milk for almond milk, which would drastically cut calories and fat without, I think, sacrificing flavor. And that means I can have three scoops next time, right? Right?