So I recommitted myself to the goal of developing a few easy-to-remember guidelines. My approach is founded on this idea: If you know how to make a good ice cream base (the unfrozen custard or cream mixture) and can come up with a good sorbet base (by puréeing your fruit and then adding sugar and lemon to taste), you can combine them and make a very nice ice cream. You can also infuse a base—by steeping it with vanilla beans or coffee beans or herbs—and freeze the result by itself, or combine it with another base, to layer flavors. It’s simple, and seems to work fine.
The quickest base also happens to be the cleanest-tasting, making it a perfect complement to succulent fruits. Sometimes called Philadelphia-style, it comes together in about three minutes, with a cup of cold milk, a cup of cream, a third of a cup of superfine sugar, a splash of vanilla, and a pinch of salt. Add some fruit purée—three cups is nice, but less is fine, too—strained, brightened with a squirt of lemon juice, and sweetened with superfine sugar or sugar syrup until it’s just a tad too sweet on your tongue. Then chill it in the refrigerator and freeze it in your ice cream maker. It will taste wonderful right off, and for about seven hours thereafter, but then it will start to become icy and lose its puddingy smoothness.
Jon Snyder, who started Ciao Bella in 1984 and now owns Il Laboratorio del Gelato, an ice-cream-perfecting company in New York City, also likes this kind of clean, eggless ice cream base. If you’re interested in improving the body and longevity of your Philadelphia ice cream, you can follow his lead and make a high-tech version of the base, using more milk and less cream, adding in a little nonfat dried-milk powder for density (and a faintly soft-serve flavor) and mixing your sugar with an emulsifier like guar gum or xanthan gum.
My own favorite base happens to be the old-fashioned, time-consuming French custard. To me, the egg yolks add a richness that cozies up quite nicely to most fruits. Custard-based ice cream also stays pliable after a couple of days in the freezer, since eggs act as an emulsifier, binding the other ingredients together. I cook the base as I would a crème anglaise (using four yolks, a third of a cup of sugar, and one cup each of milk and cream), but with this difference: Rather than heating the cream with the other ingredients, I keep it nearby, and the moment the egg mixture gets thick—quite thick, like pudding—I pour it in to stop the eggs from overcooking.
I like this trick, which I learned from a food editor friend, because I used to get nervous about overcooking the eggs and even more nervous about leaving them raw. Once, on vacation, when I was new to homemade ice cream, I accidentally left my custard on the stove too long and ended up with blackberry-scrambled-egg ice cream. It was disgusting, but my relatives literally used physical force to prevent me from throwing it out. They ate it all, the shameless goats. Which just goes to show, when it comes to ice cream, you can screw up mightily and still make people happy.
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