Do you love chunky ice cream? Are you thinking of whipping up some homemade ice cream with shards of fresh cookies or blocks of brownies? Here are three tips for getting great flavor and texture from your mixed-up ice cream.
One of my family's favorite kinds of ice cream is called Sugar Daddy, from Jeni's Ice Cream. This is a seasonal flavor of cheesecake ice cream with rich, fudgy brownies mixed in. They were heartbroken when the brief season passed for this treat (what's seasonal about brownies? my brother demanded) so I recreated it for them. It's not hard, but mixing brownies or crumbly cookies into ice cream should usually happen in these three steps.
1. Cut up your mix-ins. I feel personally that a mix-in should be no larger than 1 inch to a side. So I cut brownies into small cubes, and cookies or crackers like the chocolate-covered peanut butter crackers above into half moons or wedges.
2. Freeze your mix-ins solid. Spread your cut-up brownies or cookies in a pan and put them in the freezer for about 1 hour to freeze. Many baked goods will be crumbly and crumb-y if stirred in at room temperature, leaving you with brownie crumb ice cream, instead of creamy ice cream with chunks of brownie. You want to freeze the cut-up pieces into hard, tough chunks. They will relax and soften once stirred into the ice cream, so don't worry about them being too hard.
3. Fold baked goods into ice cream by hand. The final step in mixing your ice cream with brownies or cookies is to fold in your frozen pieces in by hand. Adding baked goods to a churning ice cream maker usually results in crumbs or smears of brownie or cake — not the discrete chunks you're after.
Freeze the ice cream as directed in your ice cream maker, then scrape it out when finished into a large bowl. Add the frozen pieces of cookie, brownie, or cake, and fold in gently with a large spatula. Transfer to a freezer container, cover the top with plastic wrap, cover and freeze.
That's how I recreated that ice cream with big, chewy chunks of fudgy brownie. (A little extra cream cheese added to the basic ice cream recipe gave a great cheesecake flavor.)
What are your favorite ice cream mix-ins, and have you made a chunky ice cream lately? If you'd like to try, we suggest starting with this base recipe:
• New Ice Cream Technique from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams
(Images: Faith Durand)
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Excellent how-to, Faith. Thank you!
(You get 1,000,000,000 bonus points for correctly spelling "discrete"!)
I love peanut butter in my ice cream, but I have no clue how to get it in there without just mixing it in!
And are those chocolate-covered cracker/cookies from Trader Joe's? That's what the package reminds me of. I need them, like, now.
Confab -- could you just spoon out tiny dollops of PB on parchment paper on a baking sheet and pop that in the freezer, like Faith suggests for brownies and the like?
Good tips-thank you.
re: mixing in peanut butter - when freezing the ice cream straight out of the maker I alternate a thin layer (have done this with caramel) so it almost looks like a parfait, but when you scoop the ice cream you will have the ripple effect. If this is not 'mixed in' enough, you can barely swirl the layers before freezing.
also, maybe try adding corn syrup or something similar to the pb before adding it to the ice cream? if you use my layer technique to keep the pb noticeable (not too mixed in), it will actually freeze solid, so I'm thinking corn syrup will keep it more viscous and gooey like it is out of the jar. Freezing dollops of pb before adding will keep them as hard frozen solid dollops that will not soften when you go to scoop the final ice cream.