The quietest time in the house is not nap time. It's not when the kids aren't home. It's when we are all eating ice cream. My usually chatterbox kids are absolutely silent, except for the lip-smacking sounds of ice cream being enjoyed. Thoroughly. A few years back we were terribly disappointed when the "all natural" Breyers vanilla ice cream became double-churned and "natural vanilla" with a bunch of additives including Poly Sorbate 80. We wrote to them to complain and were told that everyone prefers the double churned style but the double churning process could not be done in an all natural way. We were given a handful of coupons for the ice cream. We handed the coupons over to someone else and never bought Breyers again. Our little protest against changing a perfect product to something less desirable (to us, anyway). We still bought ice cream in general, and enjoyed it. It has always annoyed me though to read ice cream ingredients and find things like:Modified Milk Ingredients, Glucose, Mono And Diglycerides, Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Cellulose Gum, Guar Gum, Colour, Polysorbate 80, Carrageenan, Glucose-Fructose
What are modified milk ingredients anyway? How about Mono and Diglycerides? (Click and find out) We all know "colour" isn't natural, and as for polysorbate 80... yikes. Glucose-fructose is deceptive but it is the same thing as High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Coconut oil is good for you. Hydrogenated coconut oil isn't. There are so many man-made ingredients in store-bought ice cream that don't need to be there. Some are preservatives, some are thickeners, some make it melt slower, some are for color, and some are for flavour.
For Father's Day this year, I copied my sister-in-law and bought my husband an ice-cream maker. So far I have made fresh strawberry, blueberry, blackberry chocolate chip mint, and vanilla ice cream. The ingredients? (For the fruit ice cream) Fresh organic fruit, fresh lemon juice, whipping cream, organic milk, cane sugar, and vanilla extract. All natural, as organic as you want it, no preservatives or coloring, and flavor-FULL!!! My favorite so far is the wild blackberry ice cream. I followed the basic vanilla ice cream recipe that came with the machine not altering anything except for the addition of the blackberries: I soaked a cup of blackberries in 3 Tbsp of lemon juice and 1/2 cup of sugar for an hour. Then I cooked them in a pot for about 5 minutes, or until they mashed into a dark purple juice. I strained the juice into the ice cream mixture. What a treat!!! The ice cream was naturally pink from the blackberry juice, was made from fresh, wild blackberries picked that morning, and a fantastic, mild blackberry flavour. Served over fresh blackberries, this makes perhaps the best summer dessert ever!Our ice cream maker is a Cuisinart Classic Frozen Yogurt - Ice Cream & Sorbet Maker
. It is bpa-free and makes 1.4L of delicious, all natural ice cream. It comes with a recipe book and is easy to make. The mixing of the ice cream takes 20 minutes, and then you can either eat it as soft ice cream, or pour it into a container and place in the freezer for 3 hours to make hard ice cream. I paid about $60 for it.The cons of home-made ice cream:
- It takes about 3.5 hours to complete if you want hard ice cream
- It melts faster compared to store-bought ice cream
- It doesn't last very long in the freezer compared to store-bought ice cream
- It is all natural
- it doesn't contain added ingredients that aren't necessary (unless you want bionic ice cream that doesn't melt, that is a fluorescent color or that lasts forever in the freezer).
- You can make it with organic ingredients if you choose
- You can add whatever you want to it!
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