I Am Going To Be The First Person In The World To Never Get Tired Of Owning An Ice Cream Maker

For years, I’ve wanted to buy an ice cream maker, but friends who had one always told me the same story. They said their ice cream maker was too big, that it required too much prep. They said they never used it. They said they regretted buying it. But I’ve owned one for a couple weeks now, and I have decided that, unlike everyone else in the world, I will simply never get tired of it.

One of the great things about being a grown-up is that you can just have ice cream whenever you want. I’ve been an adult for a long time, but I still get a thrill from going out for ice cream without having to ask my parents. Given my love of ice cream, I’ve gotten pretty OK over the years at making no-churn ice cream out of heavy cream and sweetened condensed milk, which creates a very good dessert that’s very close to ice cream. And I’ll even cop to making banana ice cream when I have bananas in the freezer, which makes a very reasonable soft serve-alike. But I always knew that none of this was real ice cream, the kind the forbidden machine could make. 

But a few weeks ago I went to admire all the baking pans I shouldn’t buy at the home goods store in my neighborhood, and there was a Cuisinart ice cream maker I’d just read good things about, a single one just randomly sitting on a shelf. It felt like a sign, and when the person behind the counter told me they owned one and used it–sometimes, they warned me–I was sold. I hauled it home, happy to find that while its bowl takes up a lot of space in my very tiny freezer, it still fits while leaving room for other stuff.    

My Aftermath colleague Chris will surely write some blog about the best ice cream maker to buy and how to hack it into being even better, but I am more interested in the outcome–ice cream!!--than in the tools. The machine is fine; you freeze the bowl for a day, then put it on its motorized stand, press a single button, and pour in your chilled ice cream base. The bowl spins around a little plastic paddle and in 20 minutes you have something that’s very close to ice cream, though you should put it in the freezer for a few more hours to harden up. And then it’s really ice cream–any kind of ice cream you want, unbound by the limited imagination of Big Ice Cream or whatever change you can rustle up from the couch cushions. 

The thing I’ve learned about ice cream so far is that it’s a combination of a bunch of things that don’t want to bind together, that you have to convince water and fat and air to cohere through the careful application of heat and proteins and sugars. There are a million ideas about what the right way to do this is, and what the best ratios are, and what the best ingredients are. I didn’t know that ice cream, so peaceful and happy, had so much tension at its core. At the same time, a lot of this is personal preference. It’s at once a science and an art, with a surprising amount of flexibility. 

I’ve made what I’ll call three and a half ice creams so far. The first was a dark chocolate using a base devised from the founder of Jeni’s Ice Cream, a shop I enjoyed in DC, which contains the unusual ingredients of cream cheese and cornstarch. I tried it mostly because I had leftover cream cheese in the fridge the day I bought my machine, and while I was skeptical, the final product was shockingly excellent.

The next was a plum sorbet that I was worried would turn into a container full of ice shards after freezing (a particular challenge, I’ve learned, of homemade ice cream versus store bought), but which came out tart and smooth, even after several days. Its only downside was that I had too much of it, and grew eager to try new ice creams that I felt like I couldn’t justify until I’d finished the ice cream I already had. (Oh no, a crisis!)

The third was a vanilla ice cream from guru David Lebovitz, and my first foray into using egg yolks. There are a lot of opinions about egg yolks, but I was leery of them mostly because it would mean ending up with a ton of extra egg whites I’d have to find a use for. But lucky for me, Lebovitz also had a recipe for financiers, so I put my extra whites to that and mixed his vanilla with swirls of rhubarb jam I’d made in the spring. I have to say that this one was probably the best, and that egg yolks are totally worth it. (Less worth it, but still worth it, is real vanilla beans, which cost a fortune, oh my god.)  

The financiers came out weird because I didn’t have the right pan, but then I realized I could add them to a new ice cream. Enter the “half” from above: I made an earl grey base by squinting at an Amazon sample of the Jeni’s book, but I think I mixed something up in the ratios. There was oddly little ice cream, and it thickened way too fast in the bowl and wouldn’t churn any more, even though it was clearly not fully churned. That happened at about eight yesterday morning, because this is the kind of person I am now in my ice cream journey, and it was a disappointing way to start a day. But I froze it anyway, throwing in a handful of frozen financier chunks just to see how they’d hold up. It’s… okay: I wouldn’t serve it to anyone else, but it’s still ice cream, and it tastes great even if the texture isn’t what I’d hope for. 

I’m going to try this flavor combo again using an egg-based recipe, and then use those egg whites to make angel food cupcakes, which I could add to another ice cream alongside either the rest of my rhubarb jam or with some lemon curd I made, in a food waste-free loop of ice cream, forever. My biggest problem now is that I have too much ice cream, and also a lot of friends who don’t eat dairy so can’t help me eat it, though I’ve been researching non-dairy ice cream recipes obsessively to figure out what I can make for them.  

Will the novelty wear off? Probably. Is an ice cream maker a replacement for just buying ice cream? Definitely not; between freezing the bowl, prepping and chilling the ice cream base, and letting the churned ice cream chill, you definitely can’t just whip up a batch of ice cream whenever the mood strikes you. But does it totally rule to think of any kind of ice cream flavor I want and just create it, no matter how decadent or outlandish or experimental? Hell yes. I now live in a new, wide open ice cream frontier; I can see the ice cream Matrix and bend it to my will. I might grow tired of the ice cream-making process, but I will never grow tired of the ice cream-making power. I will defy the odds. I will make ice cream forever.