Recipe Notes: No Churn Ice Cream

30 June 2020

Recipes from August 2019 Cook's Country for Dark Chocolate and Vanilla

I was intrigued when I learned you could make ice cream at home without an ice cream churn. We have had churns, both hand crank and electric, but the few times we used them the results were mot spectacular. I'd like to try again some day but I would need a new churn to do that. Or do I? This recipe uses a blender instead of a churn. But does it make good ice cream?

I made both dark chocolate and vanilla ice creams using this method. (Cook's Country has recipes for other flavors, too.) The recipes and methods were the same for the two flavors except for the added flavoring. Heavy cream was added to a blender and processed to form stiff peaks. Next, sweetened condensed milk, flavorings, whole milk, light corn syrup, sugar, and salt were added. This mixture was processed to combine the ingredients. The cream mixture was poured into a loaf pan and frozen. Total preparation time was just 20 minutes though it took over six hours for the mixture to freeze using a glass loaf pan.

There were some challenges in making this ice cream. It was hard to tell when the cream was whipped properly inside the blender jar, as a result I may have over-whipped it. I also discovered that our blender is probably not powerful enough for this recipe, it didn't form and the top layers did not seem to be mixing well mixed with those at the bottom. I did some mixing by hand after blending to address this issue and it didn't seem to affect the homogeneity of the final result. The no-churn ice cream is pretty good, especially given how easy it is to make. The consistency is good as is the flavor, though it was perhaps a bit on the sweet side. Having tried it, I don't expect to use this recipe on a regular basis. As easy as it is, the ice cream does not match commercial, premium ice creams. We don't eat a lot of ice cream so it makes sense to get the good stuff when we do.