You must go buy an ice cream maker, now! Seriously. Go. Go now.
I credit William Sonoma whom I don't really like as I find them to be snooty and overpriced but I'm on their mailing list and low and behold they had a 1 day sale on the Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker and it just happened to be in red, with a extra bucket and it just so happened to be my birthday so we went and got one. I have no regrets.
I have 2 memories of making homemade ice cream before now and both of them are fond. The first was at my Grandma's cabin in LaPine Oregon one summer. She had the old a fashion kind that was a wooden bucket that you filled with ice & salt and a metal canister sat in the middle with a iron crank. I remember we all took turns for what seemed like an eternity turning the crank and adding more ice and salt and after what seemed like a ridiculously labour intensive process we were finally all rewarded with a small bowl of glorious homemade vanilla ice cream. I think I was vaguely disappointed in the fact that it was vanilla but that was when I was young and foolish and didn't understand the pure simple elegance of what is vanilla. We also probably didn't use a vanilla bean.
My second memory of homemade ice cream was in Sandy Hill's 8th grade science class. I think he was demonstrating the use of salt to raise the boiling point of water and how it makes ice water cooler, or something like that, clearly the lesson to me was homemade ice cream rocks. He used a similar old fashion maker to what my grandmother had but his was broken somehow and using it involved someone standing on a desk with one foot on top of the maker as we furiously cranked away.
Well I'm happy to say that ice cream makers have come a long way and are very simple in design. Put bowl in freeze the day before, make a custard or at least I like the custard kind best but you can literally just mix milk, cream and sugar and use that. Let the custard chill in the fridge for a couple hours. Pour into bowl, turn on maker and 20 minutes later you have pure creamy goodness.
I can't claim the recipe as I just followed Cuisinart's instructions although I did use half & half instead of heavy cream, and next time I make some (tomorrow) I'm going to use a tad less sugar. But that is the beauty of making your own ice cream, you can control the fat & the sugar.
