Vanilla Ice

Ice cream starts with eggs. Egg yolks, to be exact. Most traditional flavors (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry) are created by making a cooked custard, which consists of eggs, sugar, milk, cream, and flavoring, cooling it down, and freezing it.

Ice cream production is somewhat labor intensive, but mostly it's time intensive. Depending on your ice cream maker, you may have to freeze the chamber for 12-15 hours before churning. Once you make the custard, it has to be refrigerated for 8 hours before churning, and then after churning it has to go into the freezer for another few hours to firm up. For this reason, it's best to start the night before and let everything sit overnight. I wanted to master the basics, so for my first project I chose simple, classic Vanilla Ice Cream.

Making the custard is the most difficult part. You want to heat it without burning it, then you pour it into the egg yolks and back into the pan to avoid cooking the egg yolks and making scrambled eggs. Once you get it into the ice bath, you begin the important cooling down process. Luckily for me, this all worked out right the first time around. I owe all thanks to David Lebovitz, whose instructions were so thorough that I could not help but succeed. In the case of vanilla ice cream, it includes an extra step of infusing a vanilla bean into the cream, so you have to allow extra time for that.

Once everything is prepared and cooled, you get to do what I think is the most fun part - churning. An important step is to get the dasher of the machine started before pouring in the custard, otherwise it will start to freeze immediately and might get stuck.

I watched the entire 30 minute process standing right over the bowl. It was magic! Right before my eyes, the custard started getting thicker and thicker, until, lo and behold, we had ice cream!

I ate so much of it off of the dasher, I am surprised that any of it made it into the container. What I learned is that it expands during the freezing process, so despite what I ate, there was plenty to put into the freezer. This was a proud moment for me:

The taste was very pure, simple vanilla. Not something to knock your socks off, but just a good and wholesome taste. Knowing that it was made without preservatives, chemicals, additives, or thickeners made every spoonful that much better. Or maybe that the joy of sharing it with friends, with my friend Jude's homemade Scharffen Berger chocolate sauce on top.

We Scream

I am beginning to feel like the Brenda Dickson of cooking. "Hello, and welcome to my home. Let's teleport into my closet!" Just as she was obsessed with herself, I feel obsessed with anything that I can learn to make that is beautiful and tastes good. Hence my new all-consuming hobby: ice cream.

Apparently, homemade ice cream is something that a lot of people grew up with. Even my husband has memories of turning the hand crank in his grandmother's back yard to churn some fresh peach ice cream for the evening meal. This would have been as foreign to my family as milking a cow - ice cream was something that you bought from the grocery store in a cardboard-covered rectangle (Neopolitan was a favorite), or if you were very lucky, from the local ice cream parlor. Baskin-Robbins was the cool kid on the block in those days, with its trendy flavors and coveted ice cream cakes.

Today, it's all about foodie flavors. Local, handmade, organic, and creative iced treats have become the sought-after cones of choice, blurring the lines between sweet and savory with flavors like Peppercorn, Olive Oil, and Strawberry Balsamic. In San Francisco, one of my favorite places is Humphry Slowcombe which features flavors as exotic as Foie Gras as as local as Blue Bottle Vietnamese Coffee. It's not only the coasts that are embracing this trend - places like Jeni's Ice Cream in Columbus, OH are churning out flavors like Cayenne and Goat Cheese and Roasted Red Cherries. With these kinds of flavors, you could skip the meal and go right to dessert!

I was lucky enough to find an unused gift card a couple of weeks ago, and used it to purchase the ice cream attachment for my KitchenAid stand mixer. To go with it, I bought "The Perfect Scoop" from frozen-treat master David Lebovitz, and it has been my Bible so far in learning to make my own ice cream.

I always like to start things from the ground up, so my first experiment was with vanilla ice cream. To start, it calls for some simple ingredients: whole milk, sugar, heavy cream, salt, a vanilla bean, eggs yolks, and vanilla extract. With that, I was off and running...