It’s pretty simple and the result is delicious!

Summer is here, and that means the best season to enjoy ice cream is too! And while store-bought ice cream is always a treat, sometimes you want to enjoy the process of making it at home. That’s why, when we discovered a recipe for making ice cream without a freezer, we had to head to the SoraKitchen and give it a try. It turns out it isn’t that hard, it just requires knowledge of science and a little elbow grease.

We found the recipe on the website of popular Japanese food distributor and ice cream manufacturer Meiji, where we also learned to how to make edible slime. It’s a simple recipe made with very few ingredients, and we couldn’t wait to try our hand at it.

Ingredients

1 egg
30 grams (1.1 ounces) of granulated sugar
3 tablespoons of milk
100 milliliters of heavy cream
A small amount of vanilla essence
300 grams (10.6 ounces) of salt
1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of ice cubes

As far as equipment goes, you’ll also need:

2 bowls, one large and one small
A whisk
A wooden spatula

The large bowl needs to be quite a bit bigger than the smaller bowl. Ideally, when stacked together, you’ll want there to be a gap of 5 to 6 centimeters (2 to 2.4 inches) between their rims, but as long as there’s a decent size difference, it’s okay. You’ll also want a small bowl that easily transfers temperature, like the stainless steel one we’re using.

The first step in making the ice cream is to crack open the eggs in the small bowl, then add the sugar and whisk until the mixture becomes a milky yellow color. Then, add in the milk a little at a time, whisking all the while.

In the big bowl, add a ratio of three parts ice to one part salt. You won’t use all the ice and salt right away, so put the remainder aside for later.

Place the small bowl with the egg mixture on top of the salted ice in the large bowl, then add the heavy cream and vanilla essence and whisk again.

At this point, the ice cream is supposed to solidify after a while, so we were pretty excited, wondering how long it would take. But we whisked and whisked for ten straight minutes and it showed no signs of firming up.

Worried we messed up somewhere, we checked the big bowl, added some more ice and salt, and then diligently whisked for another five minutes until…

…the contents in the bottom of the bowl began to solidify!

With a little more mixing, the whole substance took on the texture of soft-serve ice cream.

This was the point where we switched from the whisk to the wooden spoon and began to mix the solution, making sure to scoop from the bottom up. The movement steadily became more and more difficult…

Until the consistency thickened to something a bit firmer than soft-serve ice cream and it was ready!

Altogether it took about 30 minutes of mixing, so it was pretty tough, but seeing the finished product gave us a wonderful sense of accomplishment.

For the sake of interest, after removing the small bowl, we chanced touching the salted ice. It was shockingly cold. According to Meiji’s website, as ice melts, it lowers the temperature of the things around it. The addition of salt makes the ice melt faster, creating water that’s less than 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), which makes the bottom of the bowl cold enough to firm up the ice cream.

Though our homemade ice cream required a good amount of muscle, it was really interesting to observe the mysterious process of turning sugar, eggs, milk, and cream into ice cream! But now it was time to taste it.

The heavy cream made it super rich, and it was delicious in a way that homemade dishes always are!

We were so puffed up by our sense of accomplishment that we might have even said it was good competition for luxury ice cream sold at the store. We were singing our own praises, of course, but our homemade ice cream was definitely delicious and highly satisfying.

It made us think of ways we could use it. It’d be a waste to use it in a French toast hack, but as a topping…Yum! Or together with a freshly toasted Mister Donut donut…We can’t wait to combine it with other recipes!

Source: Meiji
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