One of the hobbies we’ve picked up over the last few months has been making ice cream. We originally had written down on some to-do list – perhaps even a New Year’s resolution list – that we wanted to “make more ice cream”. It seemed more of a distant when-we-have-more-free-time-hahaha-when-do-we-ever-have-free-time kind of resolution. But then we decided to have our friends over for dinner (because we love our friends, and because it seems to be our only real motivation to clean our apartment, or at least throw everything that was in the living area into the bedroom), and we decided to try making ice cream for dessert. Now, we are not really newbies when it comes to making ice cream. We’ve tried recipes out of several books, including the ice cream maker manual (more info on the ice cream maker in later posts). We’ve experimented ever so slightly on our own, and we’ve gleaned a bit more from the internet. That, however, has still been a fairly sporadic journey spanning several (10?) years and has produced only 3 batches of ice cream that I will confidently describe as really really good. So even though we are not new to making ice cream. We are quite new to making good ice cream.
Enter Jeni’s Splendid ice cream making book. We found this book about a year ago in a fantastic little store in Durham, NC. We were both instantly drawn to its clean artsy look, the interesting flavors, and the first section describing many of the essential tools and processes of making ice cream. We splurged. We read it cover to cover. We picked out a nice summer flavor to try-Basil and Candied Pine Nuts. And we made it. We followed the directions as exactly as we could. It turned out, well, okay. The flavor was good, but the texture was simply gummy. And yet, it was the kind of ‘okay’ that leaves you thinking you can fix it-that there must be something you can tweak to turn it from ‘okay’ to ‘iscream’. So we were not entirely turned off of her method. But we did put the book down for the rest of the year. We’d look at it now and again, but we were busy, and we didn’t have time to tweak recipes, and we were always full of excuses.
That is until we decided to try it – let’s see if we can get it right – for our friends.
(Read on: Adventures in Ice Cream Part 2 – Vanilla Can Still Be an Adventure)