When I was growing up, my family had one of those ice cream makers with the salt and the cranking and the hours of exhausting fun for the small amount of homemade ice cream that we would all then enjoy. And as exciting as that was, it was not an experience that stood out in my mind as one of the “must-replicate” moments of my childhood. But now that we live in the twenty-first century, technology has progressed to the point where I no longer need to crank anything, and so making homemade ice cream has become an option for fun once again.
My wife and I received an ice cream maker for our wedding, which was nine years ago next Thursday, and we had never used it. It’s not that we didn’t want to use it, it’s just that we never did. We also got a quesadilla maker that we didn’t use for years, but then one day we did use it, and now we love pulling it out once in a while for yummy quesadillas, and so it seemed that perhaps the same would hold true for the ice cream maker, which we got out and used for the first time this past weekend.
Full disclosure: we finally used the ice cream maker mostly because our co-op was having an ice cream social and asked to use it for the event, and we thought we should test it out first before we let our neighbors take a crack at it. That being said, we were very excited to make our own ice cream.
The hardest part of making home made ice cream is finding the instructions for the machine after nine years. We initially gave up on that part and tried to find recipes and instructions online, but there seemed to be so many different ways to make ice cream at home that we weren’t sure which one would work best in our personal machine. Luckily, we eventually did find the instructions which contained the proper recipes and tips.
We decided to make the ice cream first and then read all the tips and tricks second, which turned out to be the wrong order in which to do things. We didn’t chill our bowl long enough. We didn’t chill our ingredients at all. We should have waited to add the vanilla until the ice cream was almost done churning. When we were done with the whole project we had a bowl of ice cream soup. Even after 2-3 hours in the freezer our confection was nowhere near solid.
We went to bed feeling less like Ben and Jerry and more like, well, who are two people that are terrible at making ice cream? We had been so excited about the possibilities of our chocolate ice cream with the pieces of Milky Way bars that I had crumbled into it, but clearly we were failures at ice cream making. But then, a miracle. When we got up in the morning, sitting in our freezer was perhaps the richest, most delicious ice cream we had ever tasted! I’m serious; it was ridiculously good. So good that, now that we know what not to do and that success is possible, we are going to be making a lot more ice cream around here, starting this weekend. Send us your flavor requests and we’ll try it out!