1 Ice Cream – 3 Flavors! Without an Ice Cream Maker
The 4th of July is the perfect holiday for ice cream. Homemade ice cream is so good. I love homemade ice cream because you know exactly what’s in it. As a kid, we had an ice cream maker that sat in the hall closet;it was hardly ever used. Today, there are so many different ice cream makers on the market, but who really has the room for another kitchen appliance?
The other day I saw a video on the Food & Wine website showing how to make ice cream without any special equipment except for a food processor. I knew right away that I had to try it! Any ice cream base could be used, so I whipped up an old stand by and then divided it into three separate flavors. I wanted it to be a take on red, white and blue for the 4th of July.
This process was so simple and it worked perfectly. My three flavors are delicious, too! I started with my basic vanilla and honey base. The base flavor is delicious on its own — you could just make that one flavor. I divided the base out into strawberry basil, vanilla bean cardamom and blueberry lavender. This is seriously the easiest ice cream you’ll ever make and so worth the effort! Give it a try this weekend.
- ½ cup Greek yogurt
- 1 cup whole milk
- 2 ½ cups heavy whipping cream
- ½ cup good honey
- ¼ cup white sugar
- 8 egg yolks
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1/3 cup pureed strawberries
- 2 tablespoons fresh basil
- ½ cup chopped berries
- 1 vanilla bean, seeds and bean
- ½ teaspoon cardamom seeds
- 1/3 cup fresh blueberry puree
- 1 teaspoon lavender
- ½ cup fresh blueberries
- Combine the whole milk and heavy cream together in a saucepan and bring to a simmer.
- In the bowl of an electric mixer or using a hand mixer, cream the egg yolks, sugar and honey together till thick and light in color. Stir in the greek yogurt.
- Add ¼ cup of the warm milk mixture to the egg mixture and mix. This will temper the eggs so that they don’t curdle. Stir the egg mixture into the saucepan over low heat.
- Stir over medium low heat until thickened enough that the mixture coats the back of a spoon and if you take your finger and draw a line through it, the mixture is thick enough to stay in place.
- Divide the cream mixture into three bowls. You should have about 7 cups in total; place about 2 cups in each (one should have 3 cups).
- In the bowl with 3 cups, add the vanilla bean, scraped out vanilla been seeds and the cardamom. Set aside to cool.
- In another of the bowl, add in the lavender and blueberry puree.
- In the last bowl, add in the basil and strawberry puree.
- Once everything is cool, pour each mixture into a gallon size zip lock bag. Extract the air and lay flat in the freezer overnight. NOTE: remove the basil leaves from the strawberry flavor.
- The next day, one at a time, break up the frozen bags and place chunks into a food processor. Pulse until you have a soft ice cream. If you have chunks that don’t seem to want to break down, add in a little amount of heavy cream to soften.
- For the berry flavors, add in the fresh fruit at the end and pulse so that there are chunks of fresh berries in your ice cream.
- Place in a container with a lid and place back in the freezer. You should have perfect ice cream within an hour or two.
