My new Kitchen Aid mixer came with a free ice cream maker attachment, which arrived in the mail last week. I've been promising the kids ice cream, and today was the day. I adapted a recipe from this book:
The recipe was nice and simple -- milk, cream, sugar, eggs, flavoring. (They suggested a historically typical lemon, we went with mint chocolate chip.)
I was able to make it using local ingredients, except for the chocolate and perhaps the mint oil. The cream and milk came from
the cow herd we own a share in. The eggs from a family in our Quaker meeting who raise a few chickens in their back yard, the sugar was
Michigan beet sugar. Even the mint flavoring *could* be local -- there are big mint farms in this area.
The recipe begins with a milk/sugar/egg yolk custard. The book states, "Don't expect your custard to be yellow like
Eliza Jane [Wilder]'s unless your cream comes from grass-fed Guernseys and your eggs from scratch-fed chickens."
Check. Check. The cows are Jerseys rather than Guernesys, but that's a minor detail. ;o) I don't know why the fact that my custard was bright yellow made me so happy, but it did. (What I said in
this post may have something to do with it.) Can all that beta-carotine and omega-3's make up for the huge hit of saturated fat? No? Oh well...
As much as I enjoyed getting in touch with the past, there is a time and place for modern conveniences.
Like whipping egg whites to a stiff peak and turning an ice cream dasher for 30 minutes.
I don't have any pictures of the finished product. We were too busy eating!
