A few months ago, I met Jeni Bauer from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. When chatting with her, she let us know that she is working on a cookbook to help us amateurs make ice creams as unctuous and creamy as hers.
But I am impatient. And I want to make my ice cream NOW. So I hit the web to see if I could find any hints. And indeed I did. As it turns out, Jeni had given an interview with Food and Wine, sharing some of her secrets to making great ice creams at home. Of course, being myself, I decided to loosely use her recipes as a guideline but to add my own little twist. But more on that later.
In order to familiarize myself with how ice cream actually works, I decided to do some research on how ice cream works scientifically. I had made ice cream once before, and the results had been ok (my most dedicated readers will remember that it was the eggnog ice cream from Broguiere’s in Los Angeles). The ice cream was flavorful but a bit too icy. It was more like an eggnog granita (if such a food can exist). With that experiment in mind, I wanted to know what was going on in the ice cream maker, and, if possible, how I could prevent an icy mess again.