Making ice cream from scratch used to strike me as an act of pointless culinary self-aggrandizement, like making homemade marshmallows. Why would you bother laboring over something you can so easily buy? What do you have to prove? But then I got an ice cream maker, and I saw the light. Homemade ice cream is wonderful precisely because it’s homemade. Its freshness is the most extravagant ingredient in the world.
My ice cream maker has been busy ever since. I have turned every fruit that grows in our garden—strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, cherries, pears—into ice creams and sorbets. I’ve invented ice creams for people’s birthdays, combining flavors I know they love, like apricot and almond for my mother, or pear and ginger for my dad. And I’ve discovered that presenting dinner guests with even the plainest homemade ice cream makes them feel flattered and special—quite irrationally, as if I had gone out and bought them a present.
Now I consider all those baroque flavor combinations sold in grocery stores to be overcompensating. Over the years, they’ve managed only to make ice cream seem more mundane. The perfect joy of feeling something firm and chilly melt into sweet cream on your tongue has been replaced by a craving for chips and chunks and swirls and infusions, endlessly blended into increasingly elaborate concoctions.
I make elaborate concoctions, too. I won’t deny it. Especially in wintertime, without fruit to keep me honest, I experiment with things in my pantry and fridge. I’ve infused the milk with cardamom pods, orange peel, parsley, and bay leaves. I’ve substituted crème fraîche, or Greek yogurt, or even puréed cottage cheese for the cream. I once created an exceptionally delicious cinnamon toast ice cream at the request of my kids. Recently, I started playing with emulsifiers, those weird-sounding ingredients like xanthan gum and carageenan that you see on the side of your favorite pint.
But I am not obsessed. I am not even close. How do I know? Because I have met obsessed, and it looks nothing like me.
Sam Mason is the pastry chef at wd-50 in New York City, one of that new generation of restaurants with chemistry-lab kitchens and “xtreme” attitudes about food. “I love it when someone hates something I make,” says Mason. “It means they’re thinking about what they’re eating.” I’m sorry to disappoint him, but I didn’t hate his mustard or cumin ice creams. And his celery sorbet was astonishing. Pale, gently aromatic, and soft as snowflakes on the tongue, it made me consider what happens to an innocent flavor when it’s liberated at last from the prison of texture.
Sam Mason may be an ice cream extremist but he looks like a pussycat next to Manuel da Silva Oliveira, the proprietor of the Coromoto ice cream parlor in Mérida, Venezuela, which offers customers such choices as squid, garbanzo, and spaghetti-and-cheese ice cream. Now, there’s a man who looked customer hatred in the face and refused to blink.
When I was little, my sisters and I had an ongoing contest to think up the grossest foods we could imagine. For years, our favorite was a clam chowder sundae. Just saying it made us shriek “Ewww!” and clutch our stomachs with disgusted glee. As an adult, I’ve learned to curb this reaction. Now, when a waiter sets a dish of caviar ice cream or a foie gras float before me, I manage to articulate a curious, worldly “Hmmmh.” Such ersatz maturity has served me well. That foie gras float (three tiny scoops of foie gras ice cream plus a squirt of saba soda) was brought to me at Hugo’s in Portland, Maine, at just the right point in a tasting menu, when I had determined that I could place my trust completely in the hands of Rob Evans, the chef. I approached the dish with a bit of trepidation, but it tasted so good that I actually laughed out loud, like a kid.
It’s one thing to enjoy tasting odd ice creams that a professional has concocted in his $3,000 Swiss Pacojet, and another thing to want to re-create them in your own kitchen. I cling to an idea—perhaps it’s crazy—that making ice cream at home should be a kind of spontaneous outpouring of happiness, an instinctive response to the glory of certain ingredients. I would like to walk in the door with a basket of berries or bag of peaches and set to work without consulting a recipe.
I want to be spontaneous, not reckless, however. So, in an effort to clarify the science behind my seat-of-the-pants approach, I consulted what turned out to be a very good book, Frozen Desserts, by Caroline Liddel and Robin Weir. It includes more than 200 recipes, followed by a chapter titled “Chemistry of Ices.” Here, the authors carefully describe, with the help of charts and graphs, the calculations necessary to produce a satisfactory ice cream on your own, without a recipe. You add up the grams of fat in your egg yolks, cream, and milk; then you calculate the total sugars in all your ingredients using a saccharometer. Finally, after representing these two totals as a ratio, you check a different chart to see if it falls into an acceptable range. And that’s just step one.
Currently, my kids jump up and down when I tell them I’m making ice cream. I worry that if I were to approach this task with charts, a calculator, and a saccharometer, they would skulk off to dark corners of the house and play very quietly with spiderwebs so as not to disturb my concentration.
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