Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Ice Cream!

Many of my family members are allergic to milk. My dad is so allergic that he doesn't even eat milk chocolate, but most of the rest of us get at least a slight stomach ache from drinking milk or eating it on cereal or wev. For a long while, we used soy milk, but only my dad was willing to drink the stuff; it was horrible. And soy ice cream is just not worth eating. However, because of the recent mainstream interest in organic food and anything that can reasonably claim to be "all- natural," goat's milk is available even in the local mainstream grocery store. Goat's milk isn't exactly as tasty as cow's milk, but I like it much better than soy milk, and, most importantly, its creamy enough to make decent ice cream.

I made some vanilla-cherry ice cream first, but I don't have pictures from that batch. This is the peppermint ice cream that I made on Sunday. Once enough ice has been frozen to make another batch, I'm going to make some more, either mango or plain vanilla. The thought of making just plain vanilla ice cream is a bit sad, but my dad likes it so I'm considering it. He likes mango too, though, so we'll see how inclined I am to stand up and chop up mangoes into little pieces when it comes time to make the next batch.

I smashed up pieces of peppermint candy to toss into the ice cream.

My mum's ice cream machine is about 30 years old. It still works great, though.

I made a half batch so it wouldn't overflow the top before it was churned enough to be creamy. Even using whole goat's milk isn't quite as creamy as using heavy whipping cream (go figure), so the longer it churns, the better.

4 comments:

Lonely Anthony said...

Hello

Elizabeth McClung said...

Smashing up the peppermint is clever, I just used to add flavoring but I see I was but an apprentice while you are the master. Your machine looks exactly like one of my earliest memories, a machine just like that but with a crank up to - my brother and I were responsible for the cranking for summer potlucks. So I grew to love and hate the machine (seeing people eat up what had taken so many cranks drove me crazy).

Penny L. Richards said...

Oooh, if you're making your own vanilla ice cream, you can make it more interesting with some strong Earl Grey tea, or other strong teas (experiment); I've also heard of folks adding ground cardamom, or a pinch of saffron, which at least would make it a lovely color... Vanilla isn't a completely boring flavor, with a little help...

Tayi said...

Elizabeth- I'm afraid I'm not actually clever, I just googled recipes and they all said to add crushed peppermint candies, so I did. I don't think I'd have the patience to churn ice cream by hand; in fact the very thought of it makes me wilt.

Penny- I would have never thought of adding tea to ice cream. It seems like adding enough to get a tea flavor would make the ice cream too watery? I'll have to go and google it I suppose!