I got an ice cream maker and it came today, so the first thing I did was to wash the bowl and freeze it. Definitely not long enough. Like, you’re supposed to do 16-24 hours, and I only froze it for 5 hours, but I really wanted to try it out. And right now the bowl is back in the freezer, so tomorrow I’m going to make another batch and it will probably come out better.
Because even at 5 hours freezing, the ice cream came out like a soft serve. And I used the vanilla ice cream recipe from my previous post, and OMG. It’s very tasty!
It tastes like vanilla ice cream. Not too sweet, nice texture. It was very easy to mix up. And the way the machine works, you just pour the ice cream base into the turning bowl, and the turning basically moves the ice cream against the paddle that doesn’t itself move.
I churned the ice cream for 25 minutes, added a handful of mini-semisweet chocolate chips, then churned it for another 5 minutes. Then I froze the ice cream in a container in the freezer. And voila. Ice cream has been achieved.
I’m very pleased right now.
My brother has been buying A LOT of ice cream lately. Carton after carton of ice cream that costs $6-7 a pop. And the ice cream maker was $50, which means I could make ice cream 10 times, and the machine will have paid for itself.
I bought 2 cartons of heavy cream ($5.67 each), a bottle of 100% pure vanilla extract ($5.72), and a 1/2 gallon of whole milk ($1.88), and BOOM! For less than $20 I can make 8 quarts of ice cream (and some alfredo and whatever else I want to use the cream or vanilla for). And there will be enough vanilla leftover so that next time I just need to buy cream and milk.
It’s going to be plum season soon(ish)–like, I can already see little tiny green plums forming on the trees–so I’m excited to make some plum ice cream. And the strawberries are just getting their blossoms now, but during the summertime there will be strawberry ice cream. And we have a blueberry bush that has a ton of blossoms on it, so there will be blueberries later and hopefully there will be enough to make some blueberry syrup.
I’m very much looking forward to never having to buy ice cream again. Plus I’ve seen recipes for sorbet, sherbet, and the way the machine works, I’m pretty sure I can use it to make my own slushies. I like the red flavor or the Coke flavor. Plus there’s strawberry daiquiri recipes and pina colada recipes that I would like to try, and I think I can do them in the ice cream maker.
It’s basically a frozen bowl that spins the contents around until they freeze. A very simple design.
I know it seems expensive, but it is on sale right now (it’s usually like $80), so it seems more cost-effective than buying one of the smaller cup mixer ice cream makers for $30, or a slushie cup for $20. The machine I got can make 1.5 quarts at a time.
But you don’t need an ice cream maker to make ice cream. It’s a little more work, but you can throw the ingredients into a mason jar, shake it up, freeze it, then shake it up again every 30 minutes for 2 hours, and bam. A personal serving of ice cream.
It’s just that our refrigerator is dying. It makes a lot of noise. It’s been very unequal in its cooling. So I would rather open the freezer the least amount as possible. Take frozen bowl out, make ice cream, put cleaned freezer bowl and ice cream back in, close the freezer and don’t touch it. That’s my life plan at the moment.
Like, new refrigerators cost from $1500. I’m saving up to buy a chest freezer ($220) so I don’t have to worry about self-defrosting and refrosting meat. And then I can use that for my ice cream.
I don’t know. Life is hard.
~Harper Kingsley
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My plum tree’s also got little green babies, but by the time they get around half grown there’s only a handful left still hanging on the tree, and those fall off soon after. I don’t know if it’s squirrels bothering them or not.
Re the fridge, I highly recommend keeping an eye on Craigslist. When my last one went out in December 2023, I found one for $60, and it’s still running.