I'm super excited to share this post with you! I'll give a detailed explanation of this ice cream as well as provide you with some direct comparison tasting notes from taking both the vanilla ice cream and Philadelphia ice cream batches to a friends bbq last weekend.
First things first, what is the difference between normal ice cream and Philadelphia style ice cream? David Lebovitz provides a much more nuanced explanation for this in his book, but it all boils down to egg yolks. In most normal ice creams there are egg yolks. In Philadelphia style ice cream there aren't any egg yolks. I would compare this ice cream to most of the types of ice cream you are going to get from the store. It's still a delicious treat but it's not quite as decadent and rich as ice cream with egg yolks in it. The benefit of this style of ice cream is the time it takes to make it. I put this batch together in about 10 minutes not including freezing time. The vanilla ice cream with egg yolks took me 40+ minutes to make.
Vanilla ice cream Philadelphia style
On to the making of this delicious ice cream! If the ingredients below look similar to those from the previous ice cream post... it's because they are! minus the egg yolks of course.
The awesome part of this is the fact the ice cream is super easy to put together. Basically, you combine all of these ingredients with a little bit of heat, chill the mixture, and then put it in the ice cream maker. It's actually that simple. I wouldn't quite say this is an ice cream you could throw together for an after dinner dessert on a week night, but you could definitely decide you want ice cream for dessert in the afternoon on a weekend and have this ready for after dinner.
Comparison
Alright, now for a comparison of these two delicious vanilla ice creams. As I stated previously, we tooke these to our friends BBQ last weekend and did a taste test. Here's a picture of the two ice creams in their containers after freezing.
If you are wondering where i have gotten these containers please use the amazon link below. I've been super happy with the containers so far. After a couple more batches I'll provide an in depth review via a blog post about them. But, so far so good.
Both of these ice creams were AWESOME. Surprisingly, we were split on who liked which ice cream more. I would summarize the differences between the ice creams as follows.
Vanilla ice cream (with yolks): this ice cream was incredibly rich. It was still very "vanilla tasting" but what really set it apart in my mind was the richness. I stated it in my previous blog post, this is the closest I have ever had to Kopp's frozen custard outside of Milwaukee.
Vanilla ice cream Philadelphia style: this ice cream wasn't as rich. However more than one person described it as "cleaner vanilla" tasting. It's hard to quantify what that means but I would say that this batch you could taste the vanilla more and it wasn't as covered up with richness like the vanilla flavor was in the batch with egg yolks. This ice cream does taste sweeter as well.
If you are looking for a vanilla ice cream recipe, I don't think you can go wrong with either one of these from David Lebovitz. If you want something more rich, go for the batch with egg yolks. If you want an ice cream with more clean vanilla flavor try out the Philadelphia style.
Thank you for reading my blog! I'll have recipes for both the negroni I mentioned in a previous post coming up as well as a boulvardier cocktail.
