Today I tried for the first time ever to make some peach ice cream. I consider myself decent amateur cook but I must admit that my ice cream was a failure. After googling homemade ice cream there were countless versions, recipes, techniques, etc.
One thing I know is that I do want a recipe that has egg yokes. If you have a great recipe without eggs that you want to share with others who may read this thread, then that’s great! Go ahead. But I have memories from childhood and about all I know for sure is they had egg, so I’m especially interested in recipes with egg yokes.
I know this means I need to cook it, so its a lot more work and a lot more time (longer to make it AND to cool it back down). Part of the problem with mine was that even though I managed not to get any cooked egg pieces, the whole mix had sort of a thick, soupy texture (before freezing) that I think was from the eggs being cooked. I don’t think I’d call it curdled because there were no hard egg pieces, but it did have a texture that wasn’t completely clean and smooth. Again, I’d call it “soupy” and thick but not in a good way. Maybe it was curdled, but I thought that meant it had bits of hard egg, where mine just has sort of an eggy-thick texture.
But I stirred the mix the whole time, heated it very slow, and I heated the dairy products separately and spooned it slowly back into my yoke and sugar mixture to prevent curdling. I feel like I did it right, but the final product wasn’t very good. The texture was the main problem…the taste was ok to good.
Anyway, if anyone has a really good recipe for homemade ice cream-especially one with eggs, please post it here. I’m sure lots of us would like to have a good one. Please include instructions and techniques on how to make it.
BTW, you can just post it as a vanilla ice cream so people can add the fruit or whatever they want at the end.
Thanks all.
(@Moley , as a chef I bet you could help with this?)
Kevin, if it wasn’t a clean, smooth texture, then it probably was slightly curdled. Two things I can think of to help prevent that would be have the heated mixture a little less hot when first introducing it to the eggs, and constant stirring with a wooden spoon while slowly heating. That said, it happens to us once in awhile. Instead of tossing the mix, we put it through a very fine strainer before chilling. It disappoints me a bit when we do that because I think of it as removing protein chains.
I, too, don’t consider it real ice-cream without egg yolks!
@txpanhandle1 , you bring about an extremely good point that I was very much considering- not cooking it. But to be clear, are you saying I should just make ice cream that doesn’t include eggs, or I should use eggs but not cook it. If it’s the latter, I’m sure lots of folks will warn about salmonella and other dangers, but I have my own chickens and can use eggs that are an hour or less old from being laid. I know that doesn’t mean they can’t have salmonella or other things, but I eat my fried eggs practically raw anyway so I’m willing to try it I think.
@MuddyMess_8a thank you for that response. I sort of thought maybe it was a little curdled, but I was soooo careful not to let that happen and I thought curdled meant it had little hard pieces of egg. But mine was sort of like maybe it had thousands of super tiny pieces or something, so I bet you are right. I did the thing where I let my mix cool some and I added the warm part into the eggs a little at a time to slowly bring them to warmer and then slowly added it to the rest of the mix. But still, I bet you are right…I bet I curdled it. I thought about straining it but the thickness I’m talking about seemed like it would have gone though my strainer. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to try and help. Thanks to folks like you I’m going to try a few more times!
And yes…somehow I have to figure this out because I gota have eggs in mine!
Add the eggs. I can’t guarantee anything but I don’t know anyone in my extended family who has ever suffered any ill effects of home made icecream with raw eggyolk.and we all make it that way.
You do it enough you can tell when the eggs are ready just by the feel as you stir and of course the napant test (coats the back of the spoon), where you can draw a line with your finger. One important step is to cool the custard mix (creme anglaise) immediately in an ice bath, that will stop any further cooking.
Don’t be afraid of going with out eggs, you can substitute some powered milk or even condensed sweeten milk to produce a more creamy egg-less Ice cream.
If you want to a true custard base you MUST cook the eggs, do it low and slow, and worse comes to worse go buy a pint of Breyers while you contemplate your next Ice Cream venture.
Occasionally I’ll make sorbet with egg whites, and I do enjoy raw eggs in my spaghetti ala Carbonara and Caesar Dressing. Everything in moderation
Thanks to all your help and Seth’s recipe, my second attempt at making ice cream went 1000 times better! I did watch some videos and took all your advice and it turned out really really good! I even cooked the eggs so I guess it was “true” custard based ice cream! I’m sure it will get even better next time. Thanks again.
Couple things. If you buy your eggs from a farmer who’s chickens run loose in the farm yard you have a reduced chance of Salmonella (which is the risk of raw eggs). My wife makes mayonnaise and stuff with raw farmers market eggs all the time. she soap washes the eggs before cracking.
But if you don’t want to risk full raw you should read more about the heating process and practice it. There is a fine line on success there, but it can be done.
Curtis, you may have missed it, but I have a much better way to get eggs from free range chickens than buying them from a farmer…I actually have several chickens myself, and they are all free range! They run free over my place (often to the detriment of low hanging fruit)!.
I’ve come a long way (with lots of practice, of course!) on my ice cream making, so thanks a lot to those who offered helpful advice. I’ve tweaked recipes and finally come up with what works perfect for me. One thing I have learned (the hard way) that might help other beginning ice cream makers is that you really shouldn’t disregard instructions to add the fruit at the very end. I kept getting it in my mind that if I would add the cut up peaches (and related juice) in the beginning before I even heated the milk, that it would be a lot better. My thinking was that having the peaches in the milk and egg mixture while I heated it, it would help infuse a lot more of the peach flavor out of the fruit and into the cream mixture. But there is no doubt about it- adding the peaches and peach juice at the beginning so it could be heated along with the rest of the mix causes the whole batch to curdle MUCH much easier. I cannot explain why its true, but it definitely is true. SO wait until removing the ice cream base from the heat and until it has started cooling down before you add fruit. If anyone knows why this is true, I’d love to hear. Its also possible that I just happened to make some other mistake each time I added the fruit at the beginning and so the curdling of those batches was just a coincidence- but I really am confident it was the cause. Open for discussion, tho.
