A few weeks ago we harvested a bunch of lemons from our tree, and I had good success making lemon sorbet using the food processor with this recipe. (Highly recommended!) But of course this got me thinking ... could I use the same sort of technique to make ice cream? (There was no question of what kind of ice cream to make. Vanilla! The best ice cream!) Some googling around got me to this post from The Kitchn. They did all the hard work to compare 7 (!) different methods of no-ice-cream-maker-ice-cream that are mentioned around the web. Unsurprisingly the old ice cream in a bag method came on the bottom (this never worked when I was a kid.) There were several complicated options in the middle. And on top ... a simple food processor method that was very similar to the sorbet method (which I have adapted below). The next question was what recipe to use. I wanted something as simple as possible. The advantage of making homemade is that I don't need all the fillers and stabilizers.
This simple recipe from Taste of Home seemed to fit the bill, and is fine, such as it is. But there's this other recipe for chocolate chip ice cream that was even better. But this vanilla base was too custardy (I want ice cream, not frozen custard!), a bit too sweet, and not enough vanilla punch. So I've reduced the eggs and sugar, upped the vanilla, and this comes out so delicious and smooth even without an ice cream machine. Excellent!
