Wednesday, May 27, 2009

When the theory is more fun than the practice

I want homemade ice cream, but it's just not working.
1. Last night we dug out the ice cream maker and its accompanying instruction booklets. We have two: a Green Mountain hand-cranked one that takes advantage of brawny blacksmiths and an electric one that doesn't. Since we haven't got any brawny blacksmiths alongside the pasta in the pantry, we opted to use the electric one.
2. Examined the contents of the fridge and discovered that we. had. no. dairy. products. Can't make ice cream without dairy products of some kind, right? *sigh* Definitely hard to make ice cream without dairy products.
3. Went out to the store to acquire said dairy products and ask about rock salt. Was irritated to discover they only sell it in 25 lb bags. It's summer, which obviously means I don't need 25 lbs of rock salt to defrost the driveway. Went home without the 25 lb bag of rock salt.
4. Got home with assorted dairy substances and promptly left again to buy 25 lbs of rock salt. *sigh*
5. Spent two hours bringing 3 cups of milk, 1.5 cups of sugar, and 1 tbsp of cornstarch to a simmer, and fumed.
6. Spent the following half hour tempering the eggs and trying like hell to get them to be tempered and not scrambled. Mmph.. Successfully, at least.
7. Put the machine together and discovered the ice trays were half empty. Flat out refused to go out for a third time in pursuit of ice cream-related articles.
8. In spite of not having enough ice to go with my 25 lbs of rock salt, I got the machine going. Surprise, surprise.. the machine wasn't cold enough, so the ice cream didn't get hard. It's now in the freezer going through what the manual calls the "Home Freezer Method". I do not anticipate victory.
9. I now have an inkling as to why people buy ice cream more often than they try to make it from scratch. I also now suspect I'm not likely to attempt to make pots de creme since the process is somewhat similar.
10. I want ice cream....... meh.

3 comments:

RaeS said...

:-( I'm sorry the ice cream has been such a trial. That sucks. I just buy Bryers All Natural.

My Chemistry class in high school made individual servings of ice cream using gallon sized plastic bags, sandwich size plastic bags, ice, whole milk and cream, vanilla extract, sugar and kosher salt. Threw all the ice cream ingredients into the smaller bag, the ice, salt and smaller bag into the larger bag, sealed it and shook it for all we were worth. It didn't get really frozen, was sorta like soft-serve, but it sure tasted good!

... You know, rock salt is useful for other things too. *cough*demons*cough*ghosts*cough* *shifty eyes* ;D

La Duchesse said...

I think it would probably have turned out fine if we'd had enough ice, but it's more like a frozen custard than ice cream. Mom says it's not supposed to have the same texture as commercial stuff, but.... :P

That sounds like the ice cream ball. You throw it around and eventually get ice cream similar to soft-serve. Or so I hear.

Y'know... it probably would have been cheaper to buy some Bryers. $5 for rock salt, then about $10 for assorted dairy substances, about .25 for the eggs (only used two, so my math might be off), and the electricity to run the stove and the machine. By the time you end up with about two quarts of ice cream, it ends up being about $5 a quart. O.o eep.

LOL! I don't know what you mean.. :P

the Lady said...

Sorry - but I'm grinning my butt off! Yep, we made ice cream approximately one time when we were young. To be precise, mom did. And she never did again...