2018's Annual No-Machine Ice-Cream Experiments: We're Here Again!

 Once again it's time to experiment with ice-cream creations as July, which is International Ice Cream Month, rolls around.

This year's trials have been broad and involved a lot more research and experimentation that in previous years, because nowadays as the Internet grows and information is more widely and readily available, research is easy to conduct from the comfort of your own living room.

The biggest research resource these days is YouTube, where you can find a video on nearly anything you can imagine and there are hundreds of thousands of aspiring cooking-show hosts who have taken the brave step of setting up a camera in their kitchen for the whole world to see.

Unfortunately, pointing a camera at what you're doing is as good as useless if you don't thoroughly and adequately explain what you're doing, and this is something I've discovered on my educational travels around YouTube.

Here are a few things I tried from online videos, and what the results were like for me. Spoilers: only one of them worked, and I already knew it worked.

Homemade Salt and Ice Churn

I found this video by an Italian man and it was very convincing and I gave it a try, but when I actually did I found that there was a lot of missing information:

In the video, the presenter:

Makes a simple vanilla custard in the traditional way with cream, milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla

Chills the custard to be frozen later.

Prepares a bowl full of ice and salt in a rough proportion of 1 part salt to 4 parts ice

Places a metal bowl on top of the ice and adds in the custard

Mixes the custard with a wooden spatula as it freezes from the coldness of the ice

Now, making ice-cream with ice and salt is nothing new—kids have been doing this for as long as I can remember, including when I was a kid myself—but there are several things missing from this video:

1. How long does the whole churning process take?
2. Does it have to be fine salt, or will any salt do?
3. Does the ice and salt mixture need refreshing at any point in the process?
4. Can this ice-cream be stored in the freezer in a tub, or must it be eaten immediately?

When I tried this myself, these are all problems I encountered and my ice-cream never actually froze and all the ice melted before anything happened. I used coarse salt, and maybe that was an issue, but it was all very disappointing.

Food Processor Trick

Another trick I see frequently online is using a food processor to make ice-cream in a similar way to an ice-cream churn. Most people have a food processor, and this means you don't need to buy another kitchen gadget when you already have one that'll do.

In this video, the presenter:

Takes an ice-cream base and freezes it into a thin sheet in a freezer bag

Breaks up the frozen sheet

Blitzes the frozen pieces into a smooth soft serve ice-cream

Pours it into a tin to freeze for 2 hours before eating

This one works quite well, however the ice-cream freezes into a solid lump the longer it stays in the freezer: not enough air is incorporated to keep it fluffy over long storage times. Also, I found that pouring the ice-cream base directly into the food processor bowl, popping that into the freezer, and taking it out and blitzing it every 30 minutes in the same way an old fashioned make-at-home ice-cream would be made worked a whole lot better. It was still a big frozen lump after 5 hours, though.

Semifreddo, not Ice-Cream

This one has no video, but I remember seeing Nigella Lawson do this kind of thing on one of her programmes once. In this recipe, you mix eggs and sugar into a fluffy sabayon before folding with softly whipped cream and freezing into a loaf. This loaf is then sliced up and served with fresh fruit and sauce.

I tried this and it was quite tasty, but definitely not ice-cream: it's mouthfeel was more like a frozen mousse, and as it thawed and melted it produced a thick bubbly mixture all over the plate. Like the food processor ice-cream, it too freezes completely solid if left for too long.

Cream and Condensed Milk Old Favourite

This method is the one I have used on here for about 4 years at this point, and it still works fabulously. My only tiny issue is that if you over whip the cream the resulting butter-fat can leave an oily film on the roof of your mouth that makes for quite an unpleasant mouthfeel. In comparison to the other methods, however, that's only a tiny gripe.

It has the richness of a luxury ice-cream, like Haagen-Dazs or Ben and Jerry's, so if you're looking for something a little lighter like a French ice-cream or a gelato this really isn't the recipe to use. That's why I was experimenting with the other methods to see if I could make something a little lighter and a method that could be used to make sorbet too.

In conclusion, I really think if you want to make traditional ice-cream, you need a churn, or you've simply got to accept that no-churn ice-cream will be fiddly, time consuming, and hard to store longterm. Happy ice-creaming!