Vanilla Ice, Basic Recipe - Simple Yet Very Good
Ingredients
- 5 dl (2 cups) heavy whipping cream
- 2 dl (1 cup) whole milk
- 3 whole eggs, or 8 yolks
- 150 g (5 oz) sugar (You can use only 100 g (3½ oz) if you think it's too sweet.)
- 1 vanilla pod, beans of
Directions
Mix all ingredients in a saucepan and heat it up slowly to 85ºC (185ºF) while stirring well!
If you don't have a meat thermometer, take it of the heat as soon as it has a clearly consistency and the initial small simmering bubbles begin to appear.
If it start boiling it will be ruined. It's a good idea to put the saucepan into cold water, or to scrape the cream into a cool bowl. Otherwise you risk the cream keeps heating and eventually boiling on the pan. Or it might burn.
Stir well. Milk/egg creams with sugar burns very easily.
Cool down the cream . I usually put it into a freezing bag in the refrigerator, when it's cool enough that the bag can handle it. It does not take up much space and makes it easy to cut a corner of the bag and squeeze out the cream and into the ice cream maker.
I strongly recommend an ice cream maker for freezing the ice. If you don't have a machine, then freeze it in a freezing bag the first while. Until it starts to get too hard. You can take the bag out of the freezer once in a while and "knead it" to prevent large ice crystals from forming.
When it becomes difficult to knead, cut a corner of the bag and squeeze it into the final mold.
If your ice cream maker is of the type with a freezing element that needs to be pre frozen, then you can also squeeze a little more ice out of your ice cream maker by putting the cream into it while half frozen. Then the freezing element does not have to cool it down as much, and you can probably make 1½ time as much ice with the same element.
Notes
There are many intricate and complex ice cream recipes. There is no reason why they should be so. Prepare a good vanilla egg cream and freeze it. It really is that simple.
You do not have to whip the eggs with the sugar "until the yolks are white and fluffy". This is done solely to dissolve the sugar. It does not affect the eggs. But heating dissolves sugar more efficiently. So skip that step.
For a long time I made the recipe with only egg yolks, but I find that it tastes too much of egg. So now I use whole eggs instead. Others find that only whole eggs tste too much of eggs, so you really should try both and see what you prefer.
