Frivolous Friday: Adventures in Ice Cream Making, Part 1

Frivolous Fridays are the Orbit bloggers’ excuse to post about fun things we care a lot about that may not necessarily have serious implications for politics or social justice. Although any day is a good day to write about our passions outside of social issues, we sometimes have a hard time giving ourselves permission to do that. This is our way of encouraging each other to take a break from serious topics and have some fun.

Last New Year’s, my parents gave me an ice cream machine as a gift. Ever since, I have been an unstoppable force of dessert creation. There’s almost always some in my freezer, because even though I love ice cream, I love it in pretty small amounts. The fact that there is usually so much of it in my freezer is a fact that few people other than my roommate have known…until now.

Ice cream making sounds like kind of a complicated process, and it is–but it’s easy. The first step is to obtain an ice cream machine. Mine is one of the (relatively) cheaper ones and it works just fine unless you want to make massive quantities of ice cream. All an ice cream machine does is churn the ice cream base while also freezing it so that it’s neither a solid hunk of ice nor a liquidy mess.

Making ice cream usually consists of four steps:

  1. Combining the ingredients (this often involves simmering a bunch of dairy products and adding stuff to them)
  2. Chilling the ice cream base (if you don’t do this, it won’t work)
  3. Churning the base in the ice cream machine (and, sometimes, adding stuff like nuts or chocolate chips)
  4. Freezing the ice cream (like, in the freezer) for at least a few hours

I haven’t started creating my own recipes yet, so I just basically do what the recipe says. 😛

When it comes to chilling the ice cream base, you can either put it in a sealed container and put that in the fridge for about four hours. Or, if you’re impatient like me, you can fill a big bowl with ice and cold water, pour the base into a gallon-size ziploc bag, seal it, and let it hang out in the bowl for a while until it’s pretty cold. The ziploc bag also makes for a pretty convenient way to pour the mixture into the ice cream machine.

Another smart thing to do is to make sure that when you put the churned ice cream into the freezer to finish freezing, you cover it with parchment paper first. I usually pour the churned ice cream into a tupperware, press the parchment paper onto the surface of the ice cream, and then close the container. The paper prevents those awful ice crystals of doom that have ruined every container of Ben & Jerry’s I’ve ever had.

I got to break out my ice cream machine for the first time a few days after I got it, at New Year’s Eve. I was throwing my first-ever NYE party, Russian-style. (The art of the Russian dinner party is definitely a topic for another Frivolous Friday post.) I decided that rather than normal champagne, I wanted champagne sorbet floats, because why the fuck not.

Continue reading “Frivolous Friday: Adventures in Ice Cream Making, Part 1”

Frivolous Friday: Adventures in Ice Cream Making, Part 1
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