Mint chocolate chip ice cream recipe
I got on an ice cream kick back in December, which has culminated in me making homemade ice cream.
It started at my office's Christmas party. They go all-out, renting out the Wellington Zoo for the evening, and they call it the "ZooDoo". Anyway, I was walking around the park eating ice cream and wine and talking to a friend of mine, when I thought to compare the awkwardness of even the best office party, to a middle school ice cream social.
"What's an ice cream social?" they asked, thus revealing to me yet another random thing that, it turns out, is uniquely American.
If you look up ice cream social on Wikipedia, you'll see that it started out as an 1890s dating thing. Singles come together for the wholesome activity of eating ice cream (as opposed to drinking). But in my experience growing up in Las Vegas 90 years later, an "ice cream social" was a particular type of social function held by my elementary and middle schools. They'd set out ice cream and sundae fixings in the cafeteria, and set us loose to make sundaes, eat them, and mill around awkwardly in the cafeteria. Basically, it was a rarer sister species to the more common "pizza party", but with ice cream instead of pizza.
Ice cream socials were mostly ice cream antisocials for me, because of the milling around awkwardly part. I enjoyed my ice cream, sure, but then what? Then it's just you and a bunch of the other kids, standing around in the cafeteria with ice cream aftertaste curdling in your mouth.
But I felt a certain nostalgia for it anyway, so I decided to throw an ice cream social here in Wellington. Long story short, it wasn't that successful. We bought a tub of neapolitan and a tub of boysenberry ice cream, and a posh spread of sundae fixings. But, I scheduled it at a time when everyone was ditching town for Christmas or otherwise occupied, so almost no one came. What I was left with, was a rekindled desire for ice cream.
I'd wanted to include some homemade ice cream in this ice cream social, but it turned out there are three kinds of home ice cream machines and none of them were suitable for us. First, there's the old-fashioned sort where you pour salt over ice cubes to create supercool temperatures, but none of those were available in Wellington. Second, there's a newer sort that use a double-walled bowl with a special fluid in it. You place the bowl in your freezer for 24 hours, then take it out and pour the ingredients into it. As the bowl's interior fluid thaws, it supercools the bowl's contents, not quite as coldly as the old salt-and-ice variety, but cold enough for most purposes and without as much mess and fuss. These are everywhere and cheap, but we had a tiny freezer that we wouldn't be able to fit the bowl in, so it was a no-go. And the third type is a bigger machine with its own refrigeration coils built in, but these are much more expensive and take a lot of countertop space (which we also don't have) so I didn't want to commit to one.
But, I sent an email around the office to see if anyone had a salt-and-ice or self-refrigerating ice cream maker they could loan me. No one did, but I got one response from someone with a freezer-bowl ice cream maker they were looking to get rid of. This was unsurprising; it's exactly the kind of device people buy, never use, and then want to get rid of, just like breadmakers.
Fast forward a month, we wound up getting a bigger fridge with a much larger freezer. So, I accepted my workmate's ice cream maker after all. It's a Sunbeam "Sunny" GL4500. Pretty standard, it makes up to 1L of ice cream, requires a 24-hour freeze time for the bowl, and works best if the ingredients are also cooled for several hours both before and after mixing. This is one of the main complaints about the freezer-bowl ice cream makers -- you have to plan more than 24 hours ahead to produce ice cream, but most people want ice cream spur of the moment.
Anyway, I decided to try mint chocolate chip ice cream as the first attempt. It's always been my favorite ice cream flavor, and for some reason it's very rare in NZ grocery stores. You see it at ice cream parlors, and it's one of the flavors Tip Top makes, but the only brand of mint chocolate chip available in tubs in stores is the crazy expensive OOB organic brand.
Most home ice cream recipes call for you to make a custard using egg yolks, milk, cream, and sugar. The eggs are a crucial ingredient in generating the normal ice cream "creaminess" and texture. You have to make this on the stovetop, and then for a freezer-bowl ice cream maker you have to refrigerate it for several hours to make it cold enough to use in your ice cream maker.
Well, I'm impatient. And I don't like eggs. And I like thinner, more icy ice creams anyway, stuff that's more typically called "ice milk". So I just used what I had on hand. I was also all out of chocolate chips from trying to replicate Keebler's soft-batch cookies last weekend (that's a story for another post), so I chopped up the dark chocolate bar I had leftover from making mole.
The results were... not great.
It started at my office's Christmas party. They go all-out, renting out the Wellington Zoo for the evening, and they call it the "ZooDoo". Anyway, I was walking around the park eating ice cream and wine and talking to a friend of mine, when I thought to compare the awkwardness of even the best office party, to a middle school ice cream social.
"What's an ice cream social?" they asked, thus revealing to me yet another random thing that, it turns out, is uniquely American.
If you look up ice cream social on Wikipedia, you'll see that it started out as an 1890s dating thing. Singles come together for the wholesome activity of eating ice cream (as opposed to drinking). But in my experience growing up in Las Vegas 90 years later, an "ice cream social" was a particular type of social function held by my elementary and middle schools. They'd set out ice cream and sundae fixings in the cafeteria, and set us loose to make sundaes, eat them, and mill around awkwardly in the cafeteria. Basically, it was a rarer sister species to the more common "pizza party", but with ice cream instead of pizza.
Ice cream socials were mostly ice cream antisocials for me, because of the milling around awkwardly part. I enjoyed my ice cream, sure, but then what? Then it's just you and a bunch of the other kids, standing around in the cafeteria with ice cream aftertaste curdling in your mouth.
But I felt a certain nostalgia for it anyway, so I decided to throw an ice cream social here in Wellington. Long story short, it wasn't that successful. We bought a tub of neapolitan and a tub of boysenberry ice cream, and a posh spread of sundae fixings. But, I scheduled it at a time when everyone was ditching town for Christmas or otherwise occupied, so almost no one came. What I was left with, was a rekindled desire for ice cream.
I'd wanted to include some homemade ice cream in this ice cream social, but it turned out there are three kinds of home ice cream machines and none of them were suitable for us. First, there's the old-fashioned sort where you pour salt over ice cubes to create supercool temperatures, but none of those were available in Wellington. Second, there's a newer sort that use a double-walled bowl with a special fluid in it. You place the bowl in your freezer for 24 hours, then take it out and pour the ingredients into it. As the bowl's interior fluid thaws, it supercools the bowl's contents, not quite as coldly as the old salt-and-ice variety, but cold enough for most purposes and without as much mess and fuss. These are everywhere and cheap, but we had a tiny freezer that we wouldn't be able to fit the bowl in, so it was a no-go. And the third type is a bigger machine with its own refrigeration coils built in, but these are much more expensive and take a lot of countertop space (which we also don't have) so I didn't want to commit to one.
But, I sent an email around the office to see if anyone had a salt-and-ice or self-refrigerating ice cream maker they could loan me. No one did, but I got one response from someone with a freezer-bowl ice cream maker they were looking to get rid of. This was unsurprising; it's exactly the kind of device people buy, never use, and then want to get rid of, just like breadmakers.
Fast forward a month, we wound up getting a bigger fridge with a much larger freezer. So, I accepted my workmate's ice cream maker after all. It's a Sunbeam "Sunny" GL4500. Pretty standard, it makes up to 1L of ice cream, requires a 24-hour freeze time for the bowl, and works best if the ingredients are also cooled for several hours both before and after mixing. This is one of the main complaints about the freezer-bowl ice cream makers -- you have to plan more than 24 hours ahead to produce ice cream, but most people want ice cream spur of the moment.
Anyway, I decided to try mint chocolate chip ice cream as the first attempt. It's always been my favorite ice cream flavor, and for some reason it's very rare in NZ grocery stores. You see it at ice cream parlors, and it's one of the flavors Tip Top makes, but the only brand of mint chocolate chip available in tubs in stores is the crazy expensive OOB organic brand.
Most home ice cream recipes call for you to make a custard using egg yolks, milk, cream, and sugar. The eggs are a crucial ingredient in generating the normal ice cream "creaminess" and texture. You have to make this on the stovetop, and then for a freezer-bowl ice cream maker you have to refrigerate it for several hours to make it cold enough to use in your ice cream maker.
Well, I'm impatient. And I don't like eggs. And I like thinner, more icy ice creams anyway, stuff that's more typically called "ice milk". So I just used what I had on hand. I was also all out of chocolate chips from trying to replicate Keebler's soft-batch cookies last weekend (that's a story for another post), so I chopped up the dark chocolate bar I had leftover from making mole.
- 2 cups trim milk ("skim milk" in American parlance)
- A 284g can of reduced cream
- 1 tsp peppermint essence
- 1/2 cup caster sugar
- 50g of a Whittaker's 72% dark Ghana chocolate bar, chopped up into bits
- A few drops of green food coloring
The results were... not great.
- Lacking eggs, it never really reached normal ice cream consistency. Coming out of the mixer it was slushy, and after freezing overnight it was a hard solid that after a few minutes of thawing became a crumbly milk snow. But that's okay by me.
- The biggest problem is that it has a weird cottony mouthfeel. This was especially pronounced right out of the mixer, and was reduced a lot (but not completely) after post-mixer freezing.
- Not green enough! The mixture looked green before mixing, but after mixing it's more of a pale yellow.
- And maybe not minty enough?
- And lastly, it has kind of too much milk flavor. I suspect again, this may be due to the reduced cream. Googling it now, it appears that reduced cream is made by reconstituting cream to a lower fat content and then scalding it. That seems like just the thing to add a cottony, strongly milky flavor to a desert.
- No reduced cream! Either regular cream, or maybe just whole milk.
- More green food coloring. Maybe 1/2 tsp instead of a random little splash. (Of course this will depend on what brand of food coloring you're using)
- Use real chocolate chips. The chunky Whittaker's bits are actually not bad, but chopping them up was too much work.
- More mint essence. Maybe 1.5 tsp. Of course I've had some mint chocolate chip gelatos that were so minty they tasted like toothpaste, so you don't want to overdo the mint.
- After reading this article on seriouseats.com about how corn syrup can improve the consistency of sorbet, I want to try it in my next batch. I haven't seen corn syrup in the grocery stores here in NZ, but we do have golden syrup, an invert sugar syrup, is everywhere. So I'll try that.