Kitchen Despatches: Ice Cream for the Pleasingly Plumper

For years I filed ice cream under “things that are not sufficiently nicer when made at home to justify the bother of making them at home instead of buying them from the supermarket”.

(I often feel that I should have taken my feel for a short, sharp, punchy tagline to the cut-and-thrust world of advertising, but it is too late now.)

(Anyway.)

The problem with buying ice cream is that you never quite know what you’re getting. Cheap ice cream - the fluorescent stuff in the gigantic tubs - often doesn’t have any dairy in it at all; that’s cold churned vegetable fat you’re eating. Mmmm hmmm. And posh ice cream like Ben & Jerry’s or Haagen-Dasz is full of cream, £4 for 500ml and can you ever find a shop that stocks the coffee flavour? No you bloody can’t.

And that’s if you aren’t watching your weight. If you ARE watching your weight, forget it. You can’t have any ice cream, thunderthighs. YOU, my friend, will be directed straight to the murky realm of the “frozen dessert”. Ice lolly? WeightWatchers Frozen Desserts? Skinny Cow? Tofutti? They’ll do in a pinch, but let’s face it: they are all part of the huge anti-fatty conspiracy, a product of the giant collective mind that not-so-secretly believes that fat people MUST NOT enjoy their food.

The amazing thing is that a lot of the members of the anti-fatty conspiracy are fat themselves. And also that it is demonstrably RUBBISH. We can lose weight on delicious, healthy food that doesn’t make us feel like slitting our wrists when we look down at our plates.

Now follow me into the kitchen. Because I’m about to show you how to make 1.5 pints of ice cream that can compete with Ben & Jerrys and Haagen-Dasz at their best, but - divided into 6 servings - comes out at about 3.5 Weight Watchers points per serving (about 3 scoops), as compared to 3.5 points per scoop of Haagen Dasz.

Cardamom Ice Cream

I love cardamom more than any other spice in the world, but you can leave it out if you are some sort of crazy anti-cardamom fascist. Just know that I pity you. Still, vanilla is very respectable as an ice cream flavour, which is what you get without the cardamom, but you could also dissolve a tablespoon of instant coffee in a tablespoon of boiling water and add that for delicious coffee ice cream. Or - what the fuck - add a bit of cinnamon if you like that sort of thing. Or some ginger. Or even a bit of ground black pepper. This, my friends, is the very Platonic ideal of a moveable feast.

This is a recipe for an ice cream maker. You can make ice cream without one, but it’s a bit of a hassle: once you’ve made the custard you have to freeze it and then take it out of the freezer and whisk it every couple of hours to break down the ice crystals for that deliciously smooth and creamy texture that makes ice cream so, er, creamy. Hand churned ice cream will not be as smooth as machine-churned ice cream, but it will still be jolly nice.

(Big loss for advertising, me. Big, big loss.)

Ingredients: 300ml whole milk; 300ml low-fat evaporated milk; 4 large eggs; 100g golden caster sugar; vanilla essence or paste; ground cardamom; green food colouring, if you’re like that.

Directions

1. Break the eggs into a largeish bowl (I use a one-litre pyrex measuring jug), add the sugar and whisk energetically until you have a smooth, slightly frothy mixture.

2. Put the milk in a saucepan and scald it. Huh? What the fuck am I on about? Sorry. To scald milk is to heat it until just below boiling point. In other words, you want it to be bubbling noticeably around the edges, and for the bubbles to be starting to move towards the middle of the pan, but you don’t want them to get right into the centre of the pan and start to rise. It’s best not to boil it on too high a heat or you’ll miss the right moment. That milk moves FAST.

3. Once the milk is just below boiling, take the pan off the heat. Whilst whisking the eggs and sugar like billy-o with one hand, add the milk in a thinnish, steady stream. Cleverly, my saucepan has a little spout for pouring, but, irritatingly, it’s designed to be poured with the right hand. I need my right hand to whisk with, bitches. Someone hasn’t thought things through. But it’s fine. You’ll manage. Don’t be tempted to just dump all of the milk in at once or the eggs will curdle. Whisk it all together.

4. Hurrah! You have made CUSTARD. Well, nearly. You have nearly made custard.

5. Put the custard back in the same saucepan that you used for the milk. Heat it on a very low light, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon (if it sloshes dangerously up the sides, try stirring in a figure of eight pattern), until the custard thickens. This can take five minutes or so. I AM NOT KIDDING ABOUT THE LOW LIGHT. It doesn’t do to be impatient with custard. If you heat it too quickly the eggs will start to scramble on the bottom of the saucepan and you will have sweet scrambled eggs which may be interesting if you are Heston Blumenthal but is not custard. It feels like it will never thicken, and you will wonder if you should turn the heat up, but it will thicken and you really, really shouldn’t. Every few seconds, dip the bowl of the spoon under so that the custard (the actual custard, not the little layer of froth) covers it. Then take it out. Is there a layer of custard across the back of the spoon? If there is, run your finger across the back of it and lick it (your finger. Jesus). Has your finger left a clearly defined stripe across the back of the spoon? If it has then your custard is ready. Take the custard off the heat and pour it back into the jug that you mixed everything up in.

6. You have now totally made custard. You rock. You could, if you wanted, just drizzle it over a delicious bowl of forced pink stewed rhubarb. But you’re not going to. You’re going to leave it on the side to cool. By all means cover it if you’re bothered about skin forming on the surface, but it all gets churned up anyway so I never do.

7. When the custard is cold, stir in the evaporated milk and add a teaspoon of vanilla essence or paste - I like the paste because it has vanilla seeds in it, but there is no real difference in taste. Then add your cardamom, but go easy - ground cardamom is very very strong. Add it a pinch at a time, stir thoroughly and taste before you add any more. I find that four pinches does the trick. I had to get the Chairwoman to taste it for me because the smell of the cardamom from the bag was fucking up my tastebuds. Crazy!!! Now. If you are feeling dirty and happen to have some green food colouring knocking around, you could put just the faintest drop or two in the custard for delightful palest-green-of-cardamom-pod ice cream. Watch yourself here too, for even a few drops can turn your ice cream a fairly startling colour, although if you like that go ahead. Whisk each drop in thoroughly and go slowly. (If you don’t add colouring, the ice cream comes out a warm peachy saffron colour which I personally prefer.)

8. I like to put the jug back in the freezer for five or ten minutes, as the ice cream is better if the mixture is cold to start with, but for the love of God don’t forget you put it in there or you’ll end up with frozen unchurned custard which is pretty useless. If you have an ice cream maker with an inbuilt refrigerator, as I do because I am flash, you can start running the compressor at this point to cool the bowl down.

9. Put your mixture into the ice cream maker and churn according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Mine takes about 40 minutes, and it is very soft-set when it comes out. You could eat it, but it is better after sitting in the freezer for a few hours - this improves both the texture and the flavours.

10. This ice cream sets quite hard after a few hours, but if you put it in the fridge for twenty minutes to ripen it is eminently scoopable when you come to serve it.

And LOOK WHAT YOU MADE. Delicious home made ice cream. All made by you with a custard base and everything. Amazing.

(You are probably thinking “but Katy if you used semi-skimmed or skimmed milk then it would be even healthier” and it would certainly be lower fat. Go for it if you want to, but for me that’s too much of a compromise on the taste. Whole milk is actually a low fat food, because it contains less than 3% fat: fact. So my conscience is clear. The lower the fat content of your ice cream, the harder it is to scoop, and the less satisfying a small portion will be in terms of mouthfeel and nourishment.)