Vanilla Ice Cream with a Food Processor

 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!

Vanilla Ice Cream with a Food Processor

Ingredients:

2 cups heavy whipping cream

1 cup whole milk

7/8 cup (175 g) granulated sugar

3 egg yolks

1/8 tsp salt

2 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

First Day:

Combine cream, milk, and sugar in a saucepan, and heat over medium heat until it just begins to boil while stirring occasionally.  Meanwhile, whisk together egg yolks with the salt in a heatproof bowl.  When the cream mixture is just about to boil, add 1 cup of the cream mixture to the eggs while whisking to temper the eggs.  Add the egg mixture back to the hot cream in the saucepan, and whisk over low heat until the mixture reaches 170-180℉ (about 30 seconds to 1 minute).  Turn off heat and whisk in the vanilla.

Put ice cream base in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap and put in the fridge for a few hours.  At this point, if you have an ice cream machine you can use that.  Otherwise, put the ice cream base in a gallon-size ziploc (or equivalent) plastic bag.  Apparently this can be laid down flat directly in your freezer, but I worried about leakage so I placed the bag in a 9.5" round pie plate and it fit perfectly.  Put in the freezer to freeze overnight.

Second Day:

Remove frozen ice cream disk from plastic bag (this will require kitchen shears or a knife).  Cut ice cream disk into ice-cube sized chunks.  (It is important that the chunks aren't too large; trust me!) Put the ice cream into the food processor, and run for about 20-30 seconds. Scrape down sides occasionally and run until creamy.  Put this into a freezer-proof container.  If you have a small food processor you might have to do this in two batches.  Cut a piece of parchment paper or wax paper to put on top of ice cream in the container to prevent freezer burn.  Put back in freezer for a few hours until firm.