my foray into ice-cream-making

The concept seemed pretty simple, make ice cream with flavors you wouldn’t usually be able to get in the market. I had done this once with regular vanilla ice cream with some decent results, but that was on such a small scale that it wouldn’t have been able to be enjoyed by more than one person. So I decide to try making a pint.

Now, normally, making ice cream at home with an ice cream maker is kinda pointless, especially since they’re kinda expensive and you can just buy it at the store (and it’ll probably have better texture). Well, the exception to that would be if you have access to dry ice. Fortunately, in Davis, there are two such places to get it: Save Mart and Nugget. Apparently, with dry ice, you can make ice cream in just a few minutes, as the -160F CO2 blocks can cool down the mixture in a matter of minutes, giving a pretty good texture ice cream. Of course, finding that right mixture is key.

Ok, so I would also venture to say that, making regular flavors is kinda pointless as well. Why go through the expense and time of making vanilla ice cream when it’s 2.79 at nugget? I figured I needed to go for the one-off flavors, the kind of stuff you can’t get in markets. In other words, I wanna try the odd flavors like dragonfruit or cucumber or chicken. So, inspired by Heston Blumenthal’s bacon-and-eggs ice cream that he serves at The Fat Duck, I decided to give it a shot.

I started off with strips of bacon cut into segments, cooked in a pan until it started caramelizing. I poured in 2 cups of whole milk and started stirring. I let it simmer for a bit to give it the bacon flavor. I added eight egg yolks to it, and started stirring. Unsatisfied with the bland flavor, I added a few shots of bacon syrup to see if it’ll impart more bacon-y taste to it. Well, it most certainly did. By now, the egg had started to slightly scramble, which is what I was going for (apparently when eggs start to scramble they take on more of an eggy flavor). I took it off the flame and immediately strained it into an ice bath. This was followed by crushed dry ice being sprinkled in slowly and stirring until it thickened. It was pretty cool seeing the haze of CO2 arising as I stirred. The bubbling is pretty fun to watch too.

Of course, if you were at Luke’s fourth-of-july potluck, you know the rest of the story, but for those of you who weren’t there, well, you’re just gonna have to try it out and see if you like it. Personally, I thought it had a little too much bacon flavor and not enough eggs, but others differed in how they viewed the ice cream. As Luke puts it, he doesn’t seem to have ever recalled a stronger reaction to a single bite of food. Since this one clearly wasn’t a hit, I’m thinking of tweaking the recipe to see if it’ll work better next time.