Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

I love ice cream! How about you? If you do then you’re in luck because today we’re sharing our recipe for homemade strawberry ice cream along with some making ice cream at home tips.

In 1983, in his stand-up comedy special Delirious, Eddie Murphy talked about the polarizing effect of ice cream on our nation’s youth. Well, maybe he didn’t use those exact words, but it was a hilarious bit about how all kids lose their minds when they hear the ice cream truck coming.

But ice cream love is a lifetime affair (grown-ups love it too) and we decided it was time to take matters into our own hand and make our own homemade strawberry ice cream with fresh strawberries from strawberry season. If we have any extra strawberries we’ll save them for strawberry daiquiris or for strawberry smoothies, but priorities…let’s take care of dessert first!

 

Homemade Ice Cream Techniques & Tips

This recipe calls for scalding the milk and tempering the eggs. Basically, scalding just means heating it to just below boiling.  Then the tempering of eggs is done to prevent pouring eggs into your hot milk mixture and ending up with basically scrambled egg strands in your ice cream (I did this the first time making this recipe and almost cried).  Instead, you whisk your eggs in a large enough bowl to add a cup of the hot milk mixture to your eggs while whisking constantly.  Then, after it is thoroughly mixed, add them back into the large pot of hot milk mixture while whisking constantly.  This creates a thick, custardy ice cream.  We have started straining the finished mixture before adding strawberries just to ensure that there are no bits of egg or cornstarch to ruin the texture of the ice cream.

I’ve read that scalding really isn’t necessary now that milk is pasteurized unless you are infusing something into your milk and that you can just add the eggs at the beginning.  Here is a good article on myths of ice cream making that debunks both our scalding and tempering method.  I should try the method of whisking the eggs into the milk and heating from there, eliminating these two steps.  However, my family has made ice cream this way for decades and LOVE it, so it’s hard to mess with something this good and waste ingredients.

 

Cornstarch seems like a strange ingredient in ice cream.  However, I’ve read that it helps in ice crystal formation in lower sugar or fat ice creams.  We only used 4 eggs in this recipe, rather than the 8 egg yolks I’ve seen in many traditional ice cream recipes that don’t have cornstarch.

Another good tip while making homemade ice cream is to buy extra ice or plan ahead and empty your ice maker or ice cube trays into a container the day before so that you have 2 times the amount of ice you usually have on hand.  We ran low on ice and the ice cream maker took extra long to complete its cycle.  And it still needed to sit for maybe an hour surrounded by ice to completely freeze.  Then we had to wait an extra 2-3 hours for the ice cream to harden in the freezer.  Oh, the humanity!  Luckily, we were able to sample the partly frozen ice cream on the dasher (mixer part) of the ice cream maker.

 

 

 

Did I mention, we have a friend who claims to have never suffered from ice cream brain freeze? Yeah, we hate her, but we all love ice cream!

So, don’t buy into the notion that ice cream is just for kids, it’s for everyone! And learning to make this homemade strawberry ice cream ensures you’re never that far from your next bowl. Oh right…you also could just go to the store and but it. But, there’s nothing quite as satisfying or delicious than homemade ice cream!

Here’s our recipe for homemade strawberry ice cream: