Ice cream is easy, you start with a base, then add flavour and toppings.
Base is basically Milk and double cream and sugar.
1 - Fat = smooth, water = hard
As low fat means more water and water is what makes ice cream hard as it crystalises. The point of the ice cream machine is it freezes the mixture while moving it to minimise crystalisation.
2 - Ratio
2:1 Cream to Milk.
Supermarkets luckily sells a 300ml tub of double cream, so pour that into a bowl, fill half that with full fat milk and that is your ratio.
3 - 1 egg to the above mix. You don't need to but the protein in the egg apparently becomes a natural preservative, I think. Without egg the ice cream don't last as long (states from the Ben & Jerry book), so I guess that's what eggs does.
Steps.
1 - Whisk all the cream with the egg in a bowl with sugar (above the same amount as milk). I bought an electric whisk as this step will take a while with a hand whisk.
2 - put milk in a saucepan and put it on low heat, then mix it into the whisked cream/egg slowly whist moving.
3 - put it all back into the pan and heat slowly until thicken like a custard.
* Almost keep it moving in the pan, you do not want to over heat it, as it will separate the fat with the mix and you also get a kind of scramble egg ! Use a spatula, when the mix sticks to the back of it and you can run your finger across it cleanly then it's done.
4 - If you want vanilla ice cream then add your vanilla essence here, a tea spoon would do. Or add Mint, or orange. Add Chocolate (see below) and orange here you will get chocolate orange ice cream.
5 - Cool it but getting a bigger bowl than the saucepan and place the pan into that bowl of water to cool.
-----------------
if you want chocolate ice cream
Melt DARK (75/85%) chocolate over a bowl of water on stove, pinch of salt, and when melted add into the custard mix whilst warm.
-----------------
If you want to add toppings like marshmallows, chocolate chunks, etc, you add these at THE END.
e.g. Vanilla Ice cream with dark chocolate bits.
Make vanilla ice cream as above. When cooled, put it into the machine, and when its done and about to turn it off, add in the chocolate bits into the machine at the last minute, let it turn a few times for it to mix then take it all out.
Once the ice cream is done, you can eat it straight off (it will be soft) or put it in a container and freeze for a few hours for it to set like a store bought one. A proper smooth and soft one you can dig in with a spoon without waiting.
-------------------
The ratio to cream to milk is not set in concrete, you will also find online different ways to mix it with the egg, some recipe says heat the milk with a bit of cream but after above a dozen batches I found it my way gets to softest and smoothest ice cream every time. You could also try it with coconut cream with coconut milk to get pure coconut ice cream or that can be a non-diary version.
