Saturday, June 23, 2012

Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

Thanks to a bunch of gift cards to Bed Bath and Beyond for my birthday, (and a hearty recommendation from my Sister-in-law Sara), I was able to fulfill a long-time wish and buy a Cuisinart 2-quart ice cream maker.  We were so excited to make homemade ice cream from scratch, even using fruit from our own garden!


Here is a look at the machine, aint' she a beaut?  Ps, by the way, I was able to use their 20% off one item coupon that can be found online, or sent to your smart phone, so instead of paying $89 I saved like $17 and the total came to about $71 - which was just covered by three gift cards!  Sweet.


We decided to try one of the recipes that came in the little booklet with the machine: Homemade Strawberry ice cream.  By the way, it should be noted that this product claims you can make ice cream in about 30 minutes, which on the surface it sort of true.  There is some prep work and chilling involved to really maximize your ice cream pleasure.  The inner canister really needs to be frozen for 12-24 hours before you make your first batch of ice cream, and any ingredients you use must all be fully chilled as well.  After 30 minutes you will have something akin to soft serve, that needs to be transferred to another container and frozen to a hard ice cream state.  Other than that everything was pretty easy.  There are only a few parts and one giant knob that goes from on to off.  It's pretty fool proof.  Okay, now onto the recipe: Printable Recipe here

Fresh Strawberry Ice Cream

3 cups of finely chopped strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
4 TBSP fresh squeezed lemon juice.

1 1/2 cups whole milk
2 3/4 cups heavy cream
1 cup of sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

So let's start with the strawberries.  Chop them up and put 3 cups worth in a bowl


Add the 1/2 cup of sugar and squeeze 4 Tablespoons of fresh lemon juice in


Mix together and then chill for 2 hours (another hidden time they didn't mention but needed for good ice cream)


Two hours later the berries have all macerated and formed their own syrup.  Drain off the juice and leave just the strawberries behind in the strainer (be sure to save the juice in a bowl underneath).



Now smash half of the berries.  Check out my hubby in action here. Those strawberries didn't stand a chance...



Now it's finally time to add the milk and cream ingredients together.  Pour the 2 3/4 cups of heavy cream, 1 1/2 cups of whole milk, and 1 cup of sugar into a mixing bowl and blend until the sugar dissolves, about 1-2 minutes.  It helps if you have adorable people helping you with this process.


Next add the 1 1/2 teaspoons of good quality vanilla


Then you want to pour in the smashed strawberries, the reserve strawberry juice and stir gently together.  (By the way, save the left over 1/2 of berries that were not smashed to stir in during the last five minutes of the ice cream process). This way you will get nice chunks of fresh fruit with the strawberry flavor.


Remove your super frozen center canister from the freezer (use oven mitts) and place in the center of the machine. You are now ready to pour your mixture into the ice cream maker!!  (My hubby's super rad and retro Atari shirt can be found at Target, FYI)



Now turn the big knob from "off" to "on" and watch it start spinning!  How exciting.  Place the paddle in the center and snap on the lid and, that's it!  Now set a timer for when you need to add the stir-ins (aka extra chopped strawberries) and watch it spin about.

So riveting they can't tear their eyes away even for a second...
At the 25 minute mark we poured in the reserve chopped berries right into the hole in the top of the machine.  Also, during the spinning time, we put an oven mitt gently over the hole at the top to help keep in the cold.


We let that mix for another 5 minutes until everything was blended nicely together.  If you notice there is a little ridge at the top of the canister, so if your ice cream expands too much it will flow into that reserve space.  Be sure to measure everything properly, as the mixture does expands as it is freezing.  Now let's check out what we have:


Try to resist as you may here, but we all got out some spoons to sample what we had created.  It was delicious!!!  As you can see it's still pretty soupy so this is where we poured it into another container and let it sit in the freezer until it was a much harder consistency (which took about 6 hours).

After all that work we were rewarded with the best tasting, creamy, sweet, decedent strawberry ice cream I've ever had!

Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream - it doesn't get better than this
We kept saying to each other that it had a nice rich "mouth feel" that was awesome!  The kids wanted to try some the next day and so scandalously, we ended up having mini strawberry ice cream cones for breakfast.  We are currently taking nominations for the coolest parents ever.


I will keep posting each recipe we try, as I have found there are not a lot of 2 quart recipes out there (most are for the smaller 1 1/2 quart machine).  Next on our list will be chocolate chip mint.  Stay tuned! Ps. By the way, this machine also makes frozen yogurt, sorbet, gelato, sherberts, slushies, and drinks!  So excited to try more recipes.

2 comments:

Megan Simmons said...

Yummm Remember when we would make it on the back deck with the wooden crank and salty ice. That looks amazing

The Husband said...

Yum! This was so delicious! We are making more when our garden gives us more ripe strawberries!

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