By the time I made this ice cream, I had a couple of recipes and techniques under my belt. I had tried recipes from the booklet that came with the machine, and I had been given a few from other ice-cream-making friends. I had googled and googled how to make ice cream – The Basic Guide To Making Awesome Ice Cream is from a group in NYC that actually does PINT-SWAPPING which is a seriously cool concept (no pun intended, really). The site appears to be an archive on Tumblr, as if maybe the group has now disbanded (last post seems to be 2013?) Too bad. I could totally join a group where we swapped pints of homemade ice cream.
Scoop Adventure’s Best Vanilla Bean Ice Cream really piqued my interest. This is another food blog that seems to have stopped publishing (last post in April 2015) but this one recipe was a turning point in my ice cream recipe search because she references Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, and I bought both Jeni’s books as a result. I used Scoop Adventure’s recipe, although by this point I needed something that would feed 30 people, so I created a spreadsheet (like you do) and mixed and matched several recipes/quantities/ingredients to come up with the final vanilla ice cream for Dad’s birthday weekend in the country. This recipe makes about 1 quart.
Scoop Adventure's Best Vanilla Bean Ice Cream
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Loading...Ingredients
- 1 1/2 c whole milk
- 1 T cornstarch
- 1 3/4 heavy/whipping cream
- 2/3 c sugar
- 1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped into the milk - the recipe author prefers Madagascar, but I prefer Mexican vanilla
- 1/8 t salt
Instructions
This is based on Jeni's ice cream recipes/method. You mix the cornstarch with some milk to make a slurry and set aside. The remaining milk, cream, sugar and vanilla bean/seeds are brought to a boil, and cooked until the sugar dissolves, which in Jeni's method is 4 minutes. At this point you remove the pan from heat to whisk in the cornstarch, return to your burner and cook until it's thickened. Remove from heat, remove the vanilla bean and add salt.
The ice cream base needs to chill before you put in in your machine. Scoop Adventures creates an ice bath and pours the base into a bowl which is put in the bath; Jeni's technique is to put the base in a plastic bag and submerge it for 30 minutes in the ice bath. You could also just pour it in containers and put in the fridge overnight.
Once the base is chilled, pour into your ice cream maker and follow the directions for freezing. You can decide for yourself whether you can resist eating it right out of the machine at soft-serve consistency or whether you have the willpower to put it in containers and freeze longer (2 hrs - overnight) before eating.
Notes
I tried to find a way to reuse this vanilla bean, but it was pretty soaked with milk and I wasn't sure it would keep. Now I put that vanilla bean into whatever cream is left, and let it turn into vanilla cream for the next recipe, and I just keep moving it from cream container to cream container. However, I always start with a fresh bean for the Vanilla Bean Ice Cream.
Click for a larger photo of the Loch Ness Vanilla Bean in my ice cream base.
Why Loch Ness? Well, I got a little distracted while making the first batch – see, you put a whole vanilla bean that has been split and seeds scraped into the milk while it’s cooking, and at one point the vanilla bean popped up, and I was like WTF?!?!?! IS THAT THING IN THE MILK for maybe 2 nanoseconds before I recalled, oh yeah, I put a vanilla bean in it. I mean – it looks really awful if you don’t know what it is.
I get Mexican Vanilla beans at Penzey’s locally – I have looked at the ones at World Market (too small) and Sprouts (Ouch! they want a fortune for those!). There’s another online source called Beanilla but their prices are similar to Penzeys. I also make home-brewed vanilla extract with Penzey’s beans + vodka, and now also with bourbon.
Although I wrote this post in July, I made this ice cream in April before the Big 90th Birthday Bash, so I dated the post April 2, which is the date I posted the photo on Facebook.
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