Dishing Up Homemade Ice Cream

After two longs weeks of disgusting, painful bronchitis, I am FINALLY back to feel better. I decided I deserve a treat. 

So tonight I tried a vanilla bean ice cream recipe, to which I decided to add defrosted frozen blueberries. Alas, while the texture was extremely creamy, the taste was too eggy for me and, in general, nothing to get excited about. In one word: BLAH. So I won't share the recipe, but I will share the pics. ;-)

Below I'm slicing the vanilla bean open so that I can add it to 2% milk I will bring to a boil. I'd never cooked with a fresh vanilla bean before. I expected it to have seeds that would spill out, not a sticky inner coating that I had to scrape with a knife!

In this photo I'm whisking egg yolks, granulated sugar, and corn starch together. The finished recipe, which called for 6 tablespoons of sugar, was definitely not sweet enough. I'd have to experiment to see how much more to add to get it closer to the sweetness of commercial ice cream.

Here I'm adding the boiled milk/vanilla bean mixture to the egg yolks.

Below I've put the combined milk/heavy cream/egg yolk mixture back on the stove to thicken. Compare the thinness of the custard at this point to the thickened version in the next photo.

The mixture thickened up after only about five minutes. Tip: stir constantly, over gentle heat, until the mixture coats the back of your spoon.

After popping the mixture into the freezer so it would quickly chill, I whipped a half pint of heavy cream by hand. The recipe called for it to be thickened, yet still thin enough to drip from the whisk. Tip: cover the egg mixture with clear wrap before adding the bowl to the freezer. Press the wrap directly onto the custard so it doesn't form a rubbery skin. 

In the photo below, I'm folding the heavy cream into the cooled custard.

The rest of the work will be done by my ice cream maker. Hard to believe I'll have ice cream in just 25 minutes!

At the end of the 25 minutes, I added plump, defrosted blueberries. Next time I would coat them thinly with sugar before adding them to the frozen custard. It looks yummy, right?!

Here's the bowl my husband kindly scarfed down. Too bad it didn't taste half as good as it looked!