10 Sweet Tricks for Making Better Ice Cream (2024)

Ice cream is a miracle. You start with milk, one of the most chemically complex foods we eat. Add sugars to reduce its freezing point, and egg proteins and emulsifiers to obstruct ice crystals. Then you stick this gloppy stuff in a portable freezer and pump it full of air until spinning butterfat globules coalesce to give it form. That’s bananas, but somehow it works. Weirdest of all: Making it yourself is actually very easy.

Frozen dessert technology has come a long way since the days when Emperor Nero would send Roman slaves into the mountains to harvest blocks of ice, shave it down, and sweeten it with honey. In 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia patented the first ice cream freezer, but it required relentless hand-cranking and relied on rock salt to lower the temperature of the ice. Today, affordable entry-level ice cream makers can churn out a noticeably superior product compared with mass industrial brands, and are as simple to operate as a blender.

10 Sweet Tricks for Making Better Ice Cream (1)10 Sweet Tricks for Making Better Ice Cream (2)

You don't need professional equipment to make great ice cream

The Best Ice Cream Maker, Scoop, and Other Tools for Your Home Sundae Bar

As Dana Cree, author of the ice cream bible Hello, My Name is Ice Cream attests, professional-quality ice cream doesn't require thousands of dollars in hardware. But it does demand understanding how ice cream actually works, and using that knowledge in the war against bland flavors and icy textures.

After making ice cream for years and developing a hundred-plus flavors, here are 10 sweet tricks I’ve picked up that can help your homemade ice cream, no matter the flavor.

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1) Chill Your Base Thoroughly

Chilling your base ensures it’ll churn into ice cream as fast as possible, which translates into small ice crystals for creamier ice cream.

Whether you’re making a light and fresh eggless recipe or a dense and creamy egg-enriched custard, the first step to properly creamy ice cream starts before you churn it. Before you stick it in the machine, make sure it’s thoroughly chilled, under 50°F, which you can measure with a thermometer (see below) or guesstimate with an overnight chill in the fridge.

In many cases, “aging” your base like this improves its flavor and texture, as ingredients combine and fat globules partially coalesce to form more stable air bubbles as the ice cream churns. At the very least, chilling your base ensures it’ll churn into ice cream as fast as possible, which translates into small ice crystals for creamier ice cream. Chilling your base also gives you the added advantage of tasting it in close-to-final form, so you can make final flavor adjustments.

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2) Boost Butterfat for Volume

Butterfat adds texture insurance against iciness, especially handy if your base has watery elements like fruit purée.

Structurally speaking, ice cream is basically bread. They’re both foams—networks of compounds connecting millions of tiny air bubbles—and as you’d do with a bread dough, you can tweak an ice cream’s formula to adjust its texture. Enriching a bread dough with butter will make the loaf more tender. The same is true for ice cream; the more butterfat you add (i.e., the more cream as opposed to milk), the richer the ice cream will be. Butterfat also adds texture insurance against iciness, especially handy if your base has watery elements like fruit purée.

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Paradoxically, more butterfat also translates to a lighter, fluffier ice cream, which is why super dense gelato relies more heavily on milk than cream.

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3) Take Command of Alt-Sweeteners

High-viscosity liquid sweeteners like honey, glucose syrup, and yes, good ‘ol corn syrup make for a more viscous base, which translates into chewy richness in churned ice cream.

To continue our bread analogy: As bakers add sugar to bread to keep it soft and moist, ice cream makers alter consistency with sugar. By binding with liquids, sugar molecules prevent an ice cream base from fully freezing into crunchy ice. That is, the more sugar you add, the softer and less icy your batch will be.

The kind of sugar you add also matters. High-viscosity liquid sweeteners like honey, glucose syrup, and yes, good 'ol corn syrup make for a more viscous base, which translates into chewy richness in churned ice cream. Substituting a small portion of the plain table sugar in your recipe with one of these high-viscosity sweeteners can have a big impact on the final texture.

When it comes to sugar, viscosity isn't the only thing that matters; sweetness does too. Honey, for instance, is sweeter than table sugar, and it's easy for an ice cream with too much honey to a) overwhelm the flavor of everything else and b) turn the ice cream cloying. That's why I'm a big fan of corn syrup, which is only a third as sweet as table sugar, adds chewy viscosity, and allows me to boost the sugar level of a recipe for better texture without overwhelming the ice cream with sweetness.

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Remember: Corn syrup you buy in supermarkets is a far cry from the high-fructose stuff that goes into processed food. It’s literally just refined sugar from corn as opposed to sugarcane or beets. No need to fear it. But if you’d prefer to avoid corn syrup, glucose (powdered or in syrup form) works great too.

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No-Cook Saffron-Orange Ice Cream

Many manuals call for adding a shot or two of liquor to your ice cream base as added antifreeze insurance. This works, but you should know what it actually means, and how under certain circ*mstances it can hurt your ice cream more than help.

Alcohol does reduce the freezing point of ice cream, which translates into a softer scoop. But it's not a creamer scoop, or a more stable scoop, or necessarily a better scoop: just softer, without any increased body. Ice creams with alcohol melt faster than those without, and those with too much booze never fully freeze. Which is why I'd much rather adjust the butterfat or sugar content of my recipe before I start messing around with booze to make it creamier.

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Steep it for Killer Custard and Ice Cream

Often used in southeast Asian curries and Indian rice dishes, pandan leaf lends a subtly exotic savory note to this coconut ice cream.

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That said, liquor does have an important place in the ice cream maker’s toolkit. Think of whiskey, rum, or co*cktail bitters as another kind of vanilla extract. Both involve potent aromatics dissolved in alcohol and can lend complex background flavor to a simple base. So in any ice cream recipe that calls for flavored extracts like vanilla or mint, try substituting an equal amount of your favorite co*cktail bitters. (I’m a big fan of orange, Peychaud’s, Angostura, and saffron for this.)

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You don't need professional equipment to make great ice cream

The Best Tools for Making Your Home Sundae Bar

If you’re making a thicker, custard-style batch of ice cream, you run the risk of overcooking your eggs, curdling the base while adding unwelcome eggy flavors. Many recipes call for you check the custard’s doneness by seeing how it coats the back of a spoon and holds a line when swiped with your finger, which I find both crazy inaccurate (there’s a wide range of temperatures at which this will happen, not all good for ice cream) and unhygienic.

A quality thermometer (the Thermapen is best-in-class for accuracy, speed, and readability) will help you locate the ice-cream-custard sweet spot: 170 degrees. It'll also tell you when your chilled ice cream is ready to churn, no guesswork required.

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Sour Cream Ice Cream with Strawberries and Brown Sugar

Sour cream gives this ice cream a tang that’s balanced by a rich rum, strawberry, and brown sugar swirl. Get the recipe for Sour Cream Ice Cream with Strawberries and Brown Sugar »

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For distinct swirls, don’t swirl at all—layer. As you transfer a batch to its container, alternate ice cream with drizzles of butterscotch, caramel, chocolate sauce, or pomegranate molasses. Doing so will keep your swirls neat and tidy; the swirls will naturally form as you scoop.

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8) Sieve Your Chopped-Up Mix-ins

Sieving is a small step but an important one to keep gritty schmutz out of your ice cream.

If you want to add nuts to your ice cream as chunks, toast them in a dry pan to boost their flavor. Then chop them to the desired size and shake them around in a sifter to dislodge any shards and skin. Sieving is a small step but an important one to keep gritty schmutz out of your ice cream. Follow the same step for chocolate chips, semi-hard candies—anything that produces small crumbs.

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Bored With Ordinary Vanilla? Give Pistachio Gelato a Shot

Pistachio Gelato

Starchy sweets like cookies and popcorn will turn soggy in ice cream over time. To keep them crisp, enrobe them in chocolate or candy them in sugar. Or try these pre-enrobed options, guaranteed great in ice cream: Cracker Jacks and Pocky.

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Raspberry Ice Cream

Adding hunks of fresh fruit to churned ice cream is a risky proposition, one that generally leads to icy crystallized fruit that tastes more like freezer than summertime. Generally I prefer to add fruit as a topping to avoid the problem, but there are times that just won’t do. So for cherries, strawberries, and other small fruits, cut them into small pieces and macerate them in sugar and your favorite liquor (Grand Marnier is nice) for a couple of hours as antifreeze insurance. Or use a reliable premade: Luxardo’s maraschino cherries.

10 Sweet Tricks for Making Better Ice Cream (2024)

FAQs

10 Sweet Tricks for Making Better Ice Cream? ›

When it comes to great ice cream, cold temperatures and speed are your friends: the faster you bring your base from liquid to solid, the creamier it'll be. In a 2-quart unit, a typical batch of ice cream will take between 18 and 25 minutes to churn.

What is the secret to good ice cream? ›

When it comes to great ice cream, cold temperatures and speed are your friends: the faster you bring your base from liquid to solid, the creamier it'll be. In a 2-quart unit, a typical batch of ice cream will take between 18 and 25 minutes to churn.

What can I add to ice cream to make it taste better? ›

"You can also try diced pineapple tossed in li hing mui powder, which will add sweet, salty, and sour flavors to a simple bowl of vanilla ice cream." In addition to dried fruits, try tossing in chopped nuts, crushed cookies, bite-sized candies, or even bacon bits.

How do you make high quality ice cream? ›

Ice cream is only as good as the ingredients used to make it. So if you can afford it, buy organic milk and cream and free-range eggs, making sure that everything is as fresh as can be. If you're adding flavorings or ingredients, such as chocolate, vanilla or fruit, spring for high-quality products.

What makes ice cream creamy and not icy? ›

To get rich ice cream, you need enough fat, enough milk protein, and enough sugar to keep the water in the ice cream from freezing solid.

What ingredient keeps homemade ice cream soft? ›

In Lebovitz's book, he states that adding just a bit of alcohol to your ice cream base results in a better texture when it's churned because alcohol doesn't freeze. The alcohol prevents some of the ice crystals from forming, which makes the ice cream softer and therefore more scoopable.

Why put eggs in homemade ice cream? ›

Eggs are used in ice cream to add a rich flavor and color, in- hibit ice crystallization, and also to help stabilize or emulsify the fat and liquid so the resulting product is smooth and creamy. Commercial manufacturers use pasteurized eggs, stabilizers, and other ingredients to produce a safe and acceptable product.

What ingredient makes ice cream creamy? ›

Heavy cream – It creates the rich ice cream base. For a dairy-free alternative, check out this vegan ice cream recipe! Whole milk – I don't recommend replacing it with reduced fat or skim. Whole milk's higher fat content ensures that the homemade ice cream comes out creamy, not icy.

How do you increase creaminess in ice cream? ›

So you can up the fat in your ice cream by substituting cream for milk or half-and-half in recipes. Even more effective, is that you can also add more egg yolks if making a custard-based ice cream, which will increase the creaminess due to their emulsifying properties.

What is the best thickener for homemade ice cream? ›

Adding thickening agents, such as egg yolks, cornstarch, gelatin, tapioca starch, or even Junket tablets, enhances the texture and elevates the overall ice cream experience. Remember, making homemade ice cream is as much an art as it is a science.

What makes a perfect ice cream? ›

A great ice cream owes its smooth, creamy mouthfeel to fat, which helps keep ice crystals small. As Bauer explains, fat is also extraordinarily effective at carrying flavors, so when ice cream melts in your mouth, you are hit with the taste of your ingredients.

What makes ice cream higher quality? ›

The lower the overrun, the lower the air content, and the better the quality of ice cream. To get a bit more technical, overrun is a measurement of the volume of air relative to the initial volume of mix or base (typically milk, cream, and sugar).

What are the 3 most important ingredients of ice cream? ›

Ice cream is a frozen dessert typically made from milk or cream that has been flavoured with a sweetener, either sugar or an alternative, and a spice, such as cocoa or vanilla, or with fruit, such as strawberries or peaches. Food colouring is sometimes added in addition to stabilizers.

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