Edible DIY

By Lola Milholland
Photo by Leah Harb

As a kid, I became frenetic at the sound of an approaching ice cream truck. I would scrounge for change and then rush into the street to chase after the promise of a Push-up Pop — delicious ice cream in a toilet paper roll. A little more grown up, there’s still nothing in the world I love more than soft-serve ice cream.

I’d been reluctant to make ice cream because it seemed like a lot of hassle for something inferior to Haagen-Dazs. But one batch of buttermilk ice cream later, I knew I had been obtuse. Homemade ice cream is easy to make and delicious, plus it offers a number of advantages to the store-bought stuff: I have complete control over the quality of my ingredients, and I can make any flavor I have the power to imagine.

The building blocks of ice cream are water, fat, air, and sugar. The milk and cream provide both fat and water. As the mixture freezes, the water molecules become large ice crystals, which give solidity to the ice cream. By freezing the water quickly while churning the mixture, we create millions of tiny ice crystals, resulting in smooth texture.

With tiny ice crystals comes the problem of a fast-melting mess. However, fat acts like a winter coat for the ice crystals, but in reverse: it keeps them cold, encasing each as though in a cooler. The higher the fat-to-water ratio, the slower the ice cream melts and the thicker it feels on our tongues, giving ice cream a creamier texture and richer flavor — to a point; too much fat, and you’re churning what the French call glace au beurre, or “ice butter.”

By churning, we also beat in air, which gets trapped as bubbles within the fat. The air increases the insulation of the ice crystals.

Sugar dissolved in water lowers its freezing point. At 0°F, packets of concentrated sugar, water, milk fat, and milk proteins remain unfrozen. The millions of forming ice crystals exclude these syrupy packets, which become a thick coating around the crystals. The syrup’s liquidity, along with the air bubbles, makes ice cream softer and allows us to wiggle it in our spoons. We experience bursts of flavor as the syrup hits our taste buds.