Yes, we know it's been Ice Cream Month for a while now. (Hey, almost a whole month!) We are nearly done drooling over all these delicious ice cream recipes, but first we have one more technique for you - and let me tell you, we saved the best for last.
Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams is a Columbus, Ohio, treasure, and we just got to try their basic technique for making smooth, creamy, rich, and - get this! - eggless ice cream.
We recently posted a link to Food & Wine's article on Jeni Britton, the founder and mastermind behind Jeni's Ice Creams. Jeni's has a wonderful array of seasonal flavors; one of our favorites (and their signature) is Salty Caramel. We also love their current Gallo Family Vineyards Gold Medal award-winning Sour Cherry Lambic Sorbet.
They also had several recipes, and one thing stood out to us big-time: Jeni doesn't believe in using eggs in ice cream. She says, "I love the taste of cream so much that I hate to cover it up with anything." This made sense, since the flavors of her ice creams are so pure and crisp.
Instead of thickening her ice cream with egg yolks, Britton boils the cream down to reduce it, then adds a bit of cornstarch.
We had to try this!
We followed the recipe for her vanilla bean ice cream, adding some chopped flakes of dark chocolate while churning. Here are our thoughts:
• The texture of this ice cream was amazing!! It was soft, rich, and creamy. Where our eggless ice creams are usually icy and hard, this was incredibly soft and velvety.
• The process of simmering down the cream and whisking in a little cornstarch was much easier and faster than our usual custard process.
• We did overcook the cornstarch a bit; you can see how thick our "pudding" was. This gave the ice cream a little too much flavor of cornstarch. But this wasn't too noticeable; our taste testers raved over it.
• The addition of cream cheese for scoopability and softness is brilliant; it gives the ice cream just a slight tang, but not a noticeable flavor. It does seem to affect softness a lot.
End result? Highly recommended technique! We can hardly wait to play around with this formula a little more. Anyone else try Jeni's ice cream technique?
Related: How To Make Ice Cream Like an Artisan: Splendid Recipes from Jeni's Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio
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Alice Medrich has a recipe for sour cream ice cream in "Pure Dessert" that uses a similar technique. I had a bit of the same problem with over (or maybe under-) cooking the cornstarch, but the ice cream still turned out very well!
Claire Clark's ice cream recipe leaves out eggs. I read that when she learned about it, she didn't think it would taste as rich as an egg recipe, but after she learned otherwise, it became her go-to recipe. David Lebovitz wrote in his ice cream book that some Italian gelato recipes are starch-thickened, but he didn't have any starch-thickened recipes in his book. For me, the best evidence that this technique rocks came from Joy the Baker's Double Chocolate Peanut Butter recipe. It was one of the first ice creams I made, and instantly one of my most favorite. I've used the technique with a few other recipes, and it just rocks--thicky, rich, creamy, and flavorful!
I love all of the love you all have been giving to Jeni Britton - she totally deserves it. She makes the best ice cream I've ever had, and her flavors are exciting and adventurous all the while being rooted in local flavors and foods. I just had two scoops last night! Yum!
OneWallKitchen--I also made the double chocolate peanut butter a few days ago. It was only my second ice cream, and the first successful one. I didn't realize it was unusual in its egglessness, but we all loved it. I guess this will be my usual method from now on.
I soooooo wish I had room in my kitchen for an ice-cream maker. I feel like I'm missing out on all the creamy summery fun!
This is the same 'secret' thickening agent used in the chocolate gelato ice cream recipe for best lick - looks like you guys got scooped :)
eggs in ice cream actually really icks me out. ew.
i made her pistachio ice cream earlier this summer... it was awesome.
I made Jeni's mint ice cream from the Food & Wine article a few days back. It was absolutely lush! I made it with single cream instead of heavy, and it was still wonderfully creamy. I wish I lived near her shop, though!
You can order her stuff nationwide. It ends up being about $20 a pint I think, but if it's a special occasion, it's totally worth it. I ordered some when I moved out to CA and it was the best splurge ever.
Looking forward to trying this base in my next ice cream experiments. I have used corn starch in my bases before. Discovered that technique when I was researching gelato recipes. Some of the gelato recipes I use thicken with corn starch and they work great!
Before actually believing Jeni's technique with cornstarch and cream cheese, I've tried so many philadelphia-style batches and ended up with big failures. But this one gave me a big grin, as well as a quart of real home made ice cream ;) thanks for the post!