Amanda, Dad and Barbara plus Dad X 3 selfie sticks
My dad turned 90 this year, and my sisters and I spent a few months organizing a celebration of his life that we jokingly titled The First 90 Years. We had a party in the country that we meant to reflect our own experience at his parents’ house when we were kids, and a big part of that annual trek was homemade ice cream. I recall sitting on the big pail as the ice cream was churned, and I remember it being the best and most wonderful treat of summer. When I searched Amazon for an ice cream maker, I was determined to have it be manual so the kids at the party would get a chance to participate in making the ice cream like we did some mumbly-long number of years ago.
I found this 4 quart Traditional Ice Cream Maker, that uses crushed ice and rock salt for chilling the ice cream, and it can be either manual or electric, which turned out to be a blessing since no way was I going to sit and churn ice cream manually whenever I got in the mood!
I quickly learned that there is a lot of somewhat unforgiving science involved in making ice cream – the amount of fat, sugar, liquid and even the temperature of the ice can make it a yummy, creamy treat or a runny mess, with just a tiny error. Rock salt lowers the temperature of the ice, which makes the ice cream freeze faster/harder – not enough rock salt will make churning take quite a lot longer, but too much can make it freeze too fast.
I was officially hooked and made a vow – after ordering the above machine to be delivered ahead of the party in order to test it in advance – to make a different flavor of ice cream every week through the summer!
My cousin Martha had the recipe our grandmother used:
Grandma's Ice Cream Recipe
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Loading...Ingredients
- 5 eggs, beaten
- 1 can Pet milk
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 1/2 pint whipping cream
- 1 pint half & half
- 2 qts whole milk
Instructions
Per Martha: You just mix it and put it in the crank freezer. You need ice and freezer salt, plus towels, blankets to cover and wrap it to keep it cold after you've cranked it. The eggs were raw, of course, back when we had it.
A batch made with Grandma’s recipe plus cocoa – did not work to just add cocoa.
I hadn’t done much experimenting and research when I first tried this, although I was concerned that the ratio of milk:cream was off, since most of the recipes I had found at this point were 1 part milk to 2 parts cream. I tried it, but ended up not using it for the party, instead finding a way to avoid the whole raw-egg issue. Frankly, I eat raw cookie dough and cake batter, and have my entire life, but this was going to be served at a party with 30+ guests, and I decided not to tempt fate. Plus I found some better non-egg recipes anyway!
As it turned out, we had sort of overplanned the kid-related activities for the party, and there wasn’t any time to get them and the ice cream makings together before it was time to serve, so I used the electric motor to churn all the batches of ice cream we ate at Dad’s birthday, and the kids never had to take a single crank!
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