Homemade ice creams. Our best recipes

Creamy ice creams. What they are and how to make the best homemade ice creams.

Ice cream is that dessert that makes us travel back in time to take us for a walk through our childhood .

For its flavor, for its color, for its texture. Also because of that shock that sometimes causes cold. And despite all those good feelings, adults often still see ice cream as enemies of our age, our health, or our weight.

We have always been told (wrongly or not) that ice cream fattens, causes cavities, or raises cholesterol . But all that depends on the raw material with which the ice cream has been made.

So today we want to encourage you to make your own ice cream at home. With natural, healthy and low sugar ingredients and without colorants, stabilizers or aromas .

But, in addition, we want you to achieve a creamy ice cream . In this way, making our own homemade ice cream, we can take it daily without fear … Of course, like everything, in measure!  

Common ingredients of an ice cream

This frozen food is usually made with dairy products . This is milk or cream .

In fact, the traditional mixture for making ice cream is an English cream or custard : a curd of yolks, milk, cream and aromas. Often this base is combined with fruits and other ingredients to obtain different flavors . 

In short: to make a good creamy ice cream by hand we will need:

Sweeteners

• Sugar . Sugar dissolved in water slows freezing and therefore crystallization. Dissolved sugar water does not freeze at 0 ° C, but at less; depending on the amount of sugar. In this way we conclude that the more sugar we use, the more creaminess we will achieve , we must seek balance so as not to turn our homemade ice cream into a factory for caries and calories.
• Invert sugar . This sweetening liquid is the result of separating fructose from glucose from sugar by hydrolysis (using water as a solvent). Invert sugar is much more powerful than sugar itself in reducing the freezing point , so it is recommended to substitute a third of the sugar for invert sugar to obtain more creaminess in our ice cream.
• Honey . It is a natural antifreeze. (We want to make creamy ice cream, not a flavored block of ice.) Its characteristics are similar to those of invert sugar, but in this case we have to take into account the pronounced taste of honey , which will influence the final result of our product.

Grease

• Dairy products such as milk, cream, yogurt or egg yolks would enter here.
• This will be the base of our creamy ice cream . As with sugar, the higher the fat percentage the higher the creaminess of the ice cream (but it will also make it less healthy).

Protein

• Like fats, proteins come from egg yolk and milk, so they are present in the base of our ice cream.
• Proteins have two effects: they prevent crystallization and, at the same time, they form a kind of gelatin that traps water and makes ice crystals unable to grow.
• A trick to increase the amount of protein, and thus the creaminess of the ice cream, is to add powdered milk.

Air

• It is not an ingredient in itself, but it is a necessary component to prevent our product from freezing.
• We will introduce the air into our ice cream, whisking the mixture continuously during the manufacturing process to avoid crystallization .

Alcohol

• In case of making ice cream, let’s put coffee liqueur or pomace cream, for example, you will be in luck, since alcohol is a great antifreeze .
• Therefore you can get a creamier texture. Of course, don’t go overboard with alcohol! It is not recommended to add more than 20% to the mix.

Fruit, cocoa, nuts

• This ingredient will be the one that will give flavor to our ice cream .
• It is prepared (flavored milk, syrup or pasta, depending on the flavor and ingredients chosen) previously.
• It is set aside until we have our ice cream base ready. Then we will mix the two preparations. 

The process: butter

Butter is the process by which the texture of the ice cream changes from liquid to solid through stirring and cold . With this process what we intend is that the cream that we have prepared (with milk, condensed milk, cream, yogurt or yolk, sugar and sometimes alcohol) takes shape and becomes a kind of butter.

It is there where we must break the ice crystals. And how we do it? Well, as we pointed out in the previous section: introducing air into the mixture through movement. This is, without a doubt, the most important step to get a creamy ice cream .

• Cool. Once the mixture is made, the cream, we have to cool it. For this we will put it in the fridge for about three hours and then we will put it in the freezer for another hour or so. Once cold and resting, the aeration process begins, which can last two and a half hours more.
• Aerate. Before removing the already cold cream, we take it out of the freezer and put it in a bowl, preferably metal (it is recommended that it is cold, from the fridge). Once there we begin to beat with some rods to prevent ice crystals from forming .
• Whisk . As we say, it is very important to beat, stir our mixture, at the same time that we are cooling and thus causing its transformation from liquid to solid. This process takes two and a half hours . At this time, we will take the mixture out of the freezer to beat for 5 minutes and then we will put it back in the freezer. During the first hour, it is recommended to do it every 10 minutes . In the next hour and a half we must repeat the operation every 30 minutes . 
• Freeze . After these two and a half hours in which we will have stirred our cold mixture, we will proceed to add any topping that we feel like: chocolate shavings, cookie pieces, caramels, dried fruit … And we already have our ice cream almost ready. It only remains to wait . We leave it in the freezer and wait until the next day to try it.

If you have a refrigerator , the process will be easier. It will only take you between 15 and 30 minutes . We just have to take the cream out of the fridge and put it in the refrigerator (it is important that the refrigerator has been in the freezer for 24 hours before using it).

In this way the machine will do the work for us , since it will beat the cream with the spatula constantly and thus avoid the formation of crystals. The freezing time of the ice cream base is essential. The less time it takes to freeze, the creamier it is . 

Consumption and conservation

It is recommended to take our ice cream out of the freezer a little before serving it . A few minutes is enough.

Remember that, since they do not contain stabilizers , we run the risk that our creamy ice cream tends to generate ice crystals, so it is preferable to make an amount that will be consumed in a short period of time: 2-3 days at most. 

If you follow these steps and tips you can enjoy your creamy homemade ice cream . But also healthy and refreshing . 

What are you waiting for to surprise everyone with your favorite summer dessert?