Vanilla ice cream (ice cream batch #2)

Before I jump into a detailed account of my second batch of ice cream...  I've decided to move the food section of my blog in a specific direction for the foreseeable future ad will provide more detailed information in the net paragraph.  If you are only here to see how the ice cream turned out, please skip down to the "vanilla ice cream" heading.

My wife and I have read/cooked out of tens to hundreds of cookbooks over the years.  We use several of them regularly, and I will review those in time on this blog.  However, there is one thing that we have never done.  We have never cooked all of the recipes in a cookbook cover to cover.  My goal (we'll see how long it takes) is to make every single ice cream recipe out of David Lebovitz's, The Perfect Scoop.  You can purchase his book by following this link:

We have completed 2 recipes out of this book so far and are looking forward to cooking all of them and reviewing them here.  I'll chronicle all of the different ice creams in this blog.  I won't provide you with any recipes, but I will show you the finished product and give a detailed review of this cookbook both in a couple of weeks and at the summation of my ice cream making journey.

Vanilla ice Cream

I have a confession for you...  I have a love affair with vanilla ice cream.  In particular vanilla frozen custard.  I grew up in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area.  There is one thing, besides beer, that the city is particularly known for and that is our frozen custard.  The two main shops in town people fight over are Gilles and Kopp's.  Having grown up in the northern suburbs, I'm a Kopp's custard fan.  Whenever we go home to visit my parents we always make a pilgrimage down to Kopps custard to have a scoop in a dish with these amazing little wafer cookies they put in their dishes.

I provide you with this back story because I critically judge all of the vanilla ice cream that I eat.  EVERYTHING gets compared back to Kopp's vanilla frozen custard.  The only ice cream I have found from the grocery store that remotely compares in quality to what you get from Kopp's is Haagen-Dazs vanilla.  It's close but not quite there.  We'll have to see how the two recipes from David Lebovitz compare to my gold standard.

Just like all of the vanilla ice cream recipes you'll find on the internet or in books... the ingredients are pretty simple.  A combination of milk/cream, sugar, and vanilla.  Some recipes call for egg yolks, while others omit them. Also, some recipes call for vanilla beans, vanilla extract, or both.  

I made both of David's recipes, the standard vanilla and the Philadelphia style vanilla ice cream.  The proportions of ingredients are relatively similar between recipes, but the standard one has egg yolks and the Philadelphia style doesn't.  We took these over to a mother's day party with a couple of our friends and did a taste test.  The results of that will be on the second vanilla ice cream post so stay tuned!

Before posting some action shots and what we thought of this ice cream batch I have a second confession to make...  I love drinking and making cocktails.  Usually these are focused on gin and whiskey cocktails.  And, go figure I like to make them in particular when I'm cooking in the kitchen.  While making the vanilla ice cream I made my standard negroni.  I'll have a more detailed post in the near future on how I make my negroni's so stay tuned.  In the interim, here's a picture :)

Alright!  On to the ice cream making photos so you know that I actually made this batch instead of just acting like I did!  I already showed the ingredients on the first picture so lets jump into the the actual ice cream making process.

I'll save a full review of this recipe until my Philadelphia vanilla post goes live.  I'll tell you right now though... this ice cream is amazing.  It ranks up there with the best I have ever had and it is the first recipe in the book!