An easy recipe for no-churn ice cream
If you have a whisk, you can make ice cream. You’ll also need a freezer and ingredients, of course, but you can put your electric or manual machine away and still make a perfectly decent summer treat.
No-churn recipes with only heavy whipping cream and sweetened condensed milk as the base have flooded Pinterest in recent years, and that’s the basic technique behind Leslie Bilderback’s new book, “No-Churn Ice
Cream: Over 100 Simply Delicious No-Machine Frozen Treats” (St. Martin’s Griffin, $22.99).
Bilderback, pastry chef at N/ NAKA in Los Angeles, adds milk to the basic recipe, but even so, it’s a simple technique that can be fun for all kinds of cooks.
The basic steps are easy to measure and follow: Open a can of sweetened condensed milk and mix with 1 cup of any kind of milk. Whip a pint (2 cups) of heavy whipping cream to soft peaks and then fold the whipped cream into the milk mixture. (Half and half won’t whip, but you can use it in place of the milk for super-rich ice cream.)
You can add anything to that milk mixture .
As a pastry chef with more than 30 years in the kitchen, she lets her imagination go wild in the book. She flavors ice cream with adzuki beans and tomatoes and isn’t afraid of scaring off readers with out-there concepts such as vanilla lobster or peach and prosciutto. (Fear not, there are also plenty of crowd-pleasers, such as strawberry cheesecake and chocolate cherry.)
Because we’re in summer, my instinct is to make simple ice creams with blueberries, cherries and peaches, but I can see the sweet potato-marshmallow ice cream and apple spice ice creams making their way into my freezer this fall.
You could add sprinkles, crushed candies, graham crackers, marshmallows or syrups. Nut butters can be whisked into the milk mixture, and jam can be used to infuse throughout the ice cream or swirled in after the whipped cream and milks have been combined.
Bilderback adds a hint of lemon juice or salt and thins the sweetened condensed milk with regular milk to shave off a hint of that cloying sweetness. . You don’t have to heat the milk to dissolve the sugar or worry about tempering the eggs if you’re making a custard.