Archive for May 25th, 2010

If you’ve never made ice cream at home before, you should try it! It’s really fun and especially if you’re adventurous in the kitchen.  So much fun to invent your own flavors and find out what your favorite may be.  So far I’ve made mint chocolate chip, candied bacon/chocolate chip, and peach ice cream.  The family is REALLY loving the peach, they said it is the best yet.  There are many ways you can make ice cream.  The traditional way is a custard based, meaning eggs mixed with sugar and half cream half milk mix. Since my husband and I are lactose intolerant to milk products I’ve had to be creative in this process.  Thai style ice cream is dairy free, made with coconut milk and that was the first ice cream I’ve ever made.  It was rich and creamy and we all loved it, however, not being able to find unsweetened coconut milk meant that every batch would have a coconutty taste of some sort.  For the peach ice cream I switched to using Lactaid whole milk.  It has the fat content I needed but no lactose which is what we need to avoid.  If you are not lactose intolerant I would recommend mixing heavy cream with whole milk.  I use all lactose free milk and our ice cream is very delicious, but would be even creamier if I could use heavy cream. 

If you don’t have an ice cream maker, they are easy to find, but a little expensive.  Since I have a Kitchen Aid mixer, I purchased the ice cream attachment bowl at Bed Bath and Beyond.  It retails for $80.00, but I always have 20% off coupons for BBB, so I saved $16.00 which was nice.  They have many great plug in models, and the best deal I’ve ever seen was a model at Costco that was about $50. The only thing you need to know, is that you cannot make ice cream right away…every ice cream maker has a bowl that has to be frozen in your freezer for at least 12 hours prior to making it.  My bowl stays in my freezer at all times, so I can pull it out whenever I feel like making some.  I’m really happy with my ice cream maker attachment for the Kitchen Aid.  It is easy to use and comes with lots of yummy ice cream recipes too.  Another thing you may be surprised to see is that this ice cream recipe uses A LOT of eggs!!  However, if you love ice cream, you’ve been eating essentially, raw eggs mixed with sugar and cream and frozen into ice cream your whole life.  This is just how it is made, you won’t get sick so don’t worry. The best and tastiest ice cream needs to have eggs. If you find a recipe that doesn’t use eggs, you’ll taste the difference, it won’t be as good.

Peach Ice Cream

Ingredients

8-10 peaches ( I only had 5 yesterday and it still turned out delicious!)

6 eggs

3 1/2 cups sugar

2 cups heavy cream

4 cups whole milk 

2 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 tsp salt

whisk eggs, then add sugar to form a custard.  Skin and cut peaches away from pit, put peaches in blender or food processor until desired consistency.  I like chunks of peaches that I can taste in my ice cream so I don’t process it too much, but it does need to be blended a little to break the peach down to add the peach flavor into the ice cream.  Add milk and peach puree into custard.  Mix well, put into your ice cream maker and mix per manufacturers instructions.  Put in sealed container mark date and kind of ice cream and freeze.