Josh bought me an ice cream maker for my birthday. I’ve wanted one forever, especially since I kept seeing these recipes for amazing ice cream in various publications. I also wanted to experiment with controlling the amount of fat, preservatives, corn syrup, etc. that goes into my desserts. Ice cream seems like the next step in my low fat ‘cooking’ quest.

In our enthusiasm Josh went out and bought a bunch of imported strawberries at the local Safeway (despite my brief protest that we should wait for farmer’s market quality berries) and we dove in with the hardest strawberry ice cream recipe in the book. We started off with a custard base which involves bringing cream to a simmer and then gently adding a cup of it to a batch of egg yolks. It’s a balance between warming up the yolks and not scalding the milk. Then you have to strain the custard and wait an agonizing three hours for the custard to cool. Our first batch of ice cream took six yolks–we weren’t dicking around. Josh also felt like we need to go all out with the whole milk and the heavy whipping cream as the base. The first round of ice cream was crazy rich with the strange aftertaste of Safeway quality strawberries. The second round I took into my own hands.

I wanted chocolate ice cream…but KNOCK OUT quality. The kind that makes you ooh and aah over the spoon. I wanted fancy restaurant style ice cream…you know the $7.00 dessert you choose over the $4.00 cheesecake. I bought a block of fancy semi-sweet chocolate, I minimized the custard base to one egg and one yolk, and I low-balled the sugar. Basically, I put a ton of chocolate, cocoa powder, a smattering of sugar and vanilla, espresso powder (to make the chocolate ‘bloom’), the eggs, non-fat milk, and heavy cream into the ice cream maker and VIOLA! A concoction was made! My first thought when I tasted my homemade ice cream was: I’ve created a monster. It was that good. I actually had to cut the chocolate with a dash of whip cream and almonds to mellow it out. This was a slightly lower fat version–I had to use up the full fat dairy products in the fridge–and it still tasted dynamite. My goal is to make a product with virtually no fat…which means I might have to cross over to frozen yogurt land. I know, I know, what do I think this is, the early 90’s? Well, all the TCBY’S closed, ok! Josh’s father calls them To Crummy to Be Yummy but my family used to love those frozen yogurt joints. It was a big deal to go to TCBY and pick out your own flavor with toppings–and my DAD actually ate frozen yogurt and he NEVER ate dessert. I realize when you mess with fat content you mess with texture, but it’s worth it to me to construct my own dessert and know my latest food obsession won’t show up on my hips. Stay tuned for more tales of the ice cream maker…