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 The perfect joy of feeling something firm and chilly melt into sweet cream on your tongue has been replaced by a craving for chips and chunks and swirls and infusions, endlessly blended into increasingly elaborate concoctions.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.
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.